For The Economist online, I talked with Björk. It was a blast! And I also learned a lot about science and songwriting.

Björk Guðmundsdóttir laughs, a lot. It’s the only time while talking she doesn’t sound like “Björk”, the pop star Alex Ross once called “the most famous Icelander since Leif Erickson.” Otherwise, Björk the interviewee trills in the same register as Björk the singer, with a Nordic inflection that lilts as it rolls. Hers is a voice made for tall tales and torch songs. The laugh keeps things grounded.

Today, Björk is speaking and giggling from her home on the Icelandic coast, having been connected to me by telephone through a London PR office. She’s overlooking the Atlantic as she fields my questions. It’s the last day of summer. Our shared task is to discuss her new project, “Biophilia”. But because we both seem unsure how to approach this dense cluster of ideas we instead begin by talking about a dizzying assortment of other things, none of which likely to sell copies of the new album.

Read the entire story here.

For The Economist, I talked with Mr. Simon Pegg:

In less enlightened times, nerds were damned to the fringes of society. Their knowledge of triffids and wookiees was ignored, their habit of layering T-shirts over T-shirts mocked. But the nerds have risen up. Today they are recognised as an influential, moneyed elite. They build multi-billion dollar corporations from secret algorithms. They star in their own TV shows and film franchises. They are elected President of the United States and they attract most of the lovelorn rubbernecking at my neighbourhood coffeeshop.

But mainly, nerds get book deals. So many book deals, in fact, that they seem to have forged a new literary genre: the celebrity nerd coming-of-age story.

Simon Pegg’s memoir, “Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid” (Gotham Books), is the latest to chronicle a famous sci-fi fan’s self-actualisation. I caught a few moments with Pegg to talk about this phenomenon.

Read the entire story here.

Last summer, I was standing in line at a bookstore.

Okay, that’s not a promising start to a rock feature. I’m aware of this. It’s always best to begin these things with a bold declaration. Something like: “Mr. Big is back!” Though the problem with such pithy beginnings is that they’re often false. Because Mr. Big is never coming back. Not to the pop charts, at least. But I really was in line at a bookstore. And Thurston Moore was standing right behind me.

Read the entire story here.

Yesterday, I spoke with Ryuichi Sakamoto about one my very favorite bands, Yellow Magic Orchestra. Thanks to the Internet’s own yellow magic, our conversation is already available for the trolls.

And for you, too.

Have you heard Yellow Magic Orchestra? They just might be the best pop group ever.

Now, if you’re the kind of reader who’s suspicious of such shameless hyperbole (and huzzah for you if you are), then consider these crunchy, fact-like nuggets: In 1978, when YMO released their self-titled debut, there was nary a thing called synth pop. Five years later, after the group split, the Tokyo band’s bleeps and blips were firmly embedded in global pop music, where they’ve remained ever since. In that half decade, YMO’s sound matured at a pace rivaled only by the Beatles in the mid-’60s. Their debut’s zany exotica-disco spoofs quickly evolved into a sensuous musique concréte perfected on the last two albums of their classic period, 1983’s Naughty Boys and Service. For YMO’s members — Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono, and Yukihiro Takahashi — it was quite a ride. The gleam of those times was vividly illustrated by this 2008 exchange in the Guardian:

“We were very big,” sighs Sakamoto, “that’s why I hated it. We were always followed by paparazzi.”

“Yes, and teenage girls,” says Hosono. “They would literally chase us down the street and rip our clothes to shreds.”

“I quite enjoyed that,” says Takahashi.

Read the entire post here.

I wrote about John Darnielle and his fabulous Mountain Goats for SF Weekly:

“I’ll tell you a very funny story,” John Darnielle says. This is probably not the first funny story he’s told today. Nor will it be the last. Today is a publicity day for Darnielle. When it’s over, he will have talked to more than a dozen members of the music press. And tomorrow, he will do it all over again. He has submitted to this grind to promote his upcoming six-date tour, which he will embark upon to remind listeners of All Eternals Deck, the hyperliterate indie folk album he put out last winter with his band the Mountain Goats.

It’s a measure of his hard-won success that the dozens of journalists who’ve requested his time have been corralled into two days of 15-minute phoners. Darnielle is less available these days than he once was. That was back before his shows became events around which a whole generation of hapless Young Werthers arranged their Moleskine planners. But today, on this warm Friday afternoon in spring, and by the grace of the songwriter’s team of publicists, we have been made captive to Darnielle. There is hardly time to follow-up on his breezily expressed pontifications. We imagine this is what it’s like to be one of his many dedicated followers.

Though after 20 years, 13 albums, and a fanbase so fervent as to warrant a feature two years ago in New York magazine, Darnielle can afford to be his own person. Much of the humor in the story he’s about to tell us hinges on that fact.

Read the entire story here.

For The Village Voice online, I spoke with a longtime hero, Laetitia Sadier:  

The voice is both plaintive and bright; beguiling and stark. It knocks around a quiet range of expression, yet it sings directly—of Marx, erotic transgression, and “the Dinosaur law.” And it might have cheekily soundtracked a Volkswagen commercial or two.

The voice belongs to Laetitia Sadier and after 20 years with avant-pop bands Stereolab and Monade, she’s released her solo debut The Trip. If the comparisons to the ‘Lab (as she calls them) are unavoidable, that’s only because Sadier’s voice is so distinct. But The Trip boasts by far the freshest set of sounds Sadier has made in over a decade. She was at her home in London when I rang her on a recent Friday night. 

Read the entire article here.

For The Economist online, I wrote about Ralph Sassone’s debut novel, The Intimates:

By the time we get to know them they’re in their mid-20s: Maize is a reformed “college slut”; Robbie is a romantic idealist. She’s straight and he’s gay. She’s an unpublished writer, he’s an intern at a newspaper. New York is their oyster—picked clean. These are the unsated lives Ralph Sassone has braided into his debut novel, “The Intimates”.

The book is billed as a rare story of a male-female friendship free of sexual tension. Yet “The Intimates” isn’t the dogged exploration of platonic love the book-jacket promises. The plot is too full of sexual misadventures for that. The author spends much of the book describing Abercrombie-like specimens (“muscles ripple”; a “beefy butt” winks; T-shirts invariably cling to the torsos they cover). In Mr Sassone’s rapturous details of still-ripening bodies, there’s something of Tom Wolf’s very sexual 2004 novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons”. The lingering impression is of a story told in a voice we might call “pederast omniscient”.

Read the entire article here.

The first paycheck I received for something I’d written came from SF Weekly, a couple summers ago. Since then, I’ve benefitted enormously from the expert copyediting of Vicky Walker, who occasionally rewards me with an uproarious email, too.

You don’t know humility until you’ve spent an all-nighter slaving over 800 words, only to receive a dashed off thank you exuding more wit and erudition than you’ve read, let alone written, in the previous week. What I’m trying to say is: Vicky’s awesome.

(Also! She has the best taste in comedy. It was Vicky who introduced me to the brilliance of Chris Morris [SLYT]. And it’s Vicky who receives my Peter Cook YouTube links with the most enthusiasm.)

Last week, we worked on a profile of James Blake called “Blue Boy”. This is how it came out:

The time in James Blake’s life we might call his long winter — from which he emerged this year with a phosphorescent debut album — began as far back as the early ’90s with his first piano lesson. There, at the age of 5, he began to dissect sound with a surgeon’s chilly precision. The habit dies hard, apparently. Within the sparse synthscapes of his eponymous debut, released in February, we hear the telltale pop and hiss of things pulled apart. 

Read the entire story here.

For The Village Voice’s Sound of the City blog, I spoke with Roberto Carlos Lange: 

First there’s the owl; then there’s the enormous afro. The sight of the two in close proximity means you’ve likely entered Roberto Carlos Lange’s domain, whether it be through the front door of his Brooklyn home or by hearing one of the dozens of sound sculptures and animated films he’s completed in little more than a half-decade. I rang him one recent overcast morning to talk about Canta Lechuza, the album of pop songs he’s recorded as Helado Negro (or “Black Ice Cream” in Spanish), which is out today on Asthmatic Kitty. Helado Negro’s music is built upon a foundation of blips and bleeps over which Lange croons in Spanish. Each of the album’s tracks presents a compelling concentration of the rich, off-register world he’s constructed to date.

Read the entire article here.

I wrote about R. Stevie Moore for SF Weekly:

Leaning towers of discs seem to stalk R. Stevie Moore’s every move. At least, this is what we’ve gathered from the dozens of publicity shots that have promoted the homemade avant-pop albums he’s issued since the mid-1970s. Moore is the original of his own species: the bedroom rock star. The videophone we used to interview him gave us a view of his workspace. This makeshift studio appears in many of the articles we’ve read about him, dating back to 1978. And here, on our very own laptop, we were greeted by the familiar scene: Moore at the eye of a plastic and cardboard storm.

Read the entire article here.

For Interview magazine online, I spoke with Julianna Barwick. Tomorrow night, Julianna is home in Brooklyn, where she will play the Glasslands Gallery in celebration of Canta Luchuza, the extraordinary new album by Roberto Carlos Lange (otherwise know as Helado Negro):

Shortly after our early-morning talk with Julianna Barwick, she sent an album of photos our way. The pictures tell of a trip she took to France this past March. Included among the shots of kindly friends, fathers, and bistros are several striking snaps of the Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix, a neo-Gothic cathedral built in the last half of the 19th century. Against all technological odds, the structure’s mannered beauty has overwhelmed the sharpness of the digital image. The church’s literal glow appears to reach beyond the jpeg’s border. 

The effect is not unlike that of Barwick’s own stately edifice, The Magic Place, the debut album she issued earlier this year on Asthmatic Kitty. Proved by the album’s nine songs, Barwick has refined the highly intuitive process she stumbled upon five years ago, when she started looping her voice through an effects pedal originally designed for guitar. Her songs are composed primarily through vocal improvisations she records to a laptop. Though the input is often as simple as a four-bar melody hummed into a loop station, the output can resemble a Gregorian chant. Barwick’s moxie is the essence of her art, with the profane forever willing itself toward the sacred.

Read the entire article here.

For The Economist online, I wrote about Elenco Records, the quintessential bossa nova label:

One morning in 1961, Aloysio de Oliveira, an A&R representative at Philips Records, arrived at his office in Rio de Janeiro. As one of the prime movers behind bossa nova, his career had seen better days. Oliveira knew the sound he helped foster was fast losing momentum on the charts. For the executive, the failure was more galling, still. The genre’s flagging fortunes were due in large part to the company he worked for. To reach the coveted American market, Philips snuffed out the Brazilian stars Oliveira brought with him to the label. Bossa nova artists were absorbed into American show business as back-room players, their roles reduced to adding novelty to the repertoires of celebrities like Perry Como and Sammy Davis, Jr. In short, the nova had been let out of the bossa.

Read the entire article here.

For The Economist, I wrote a story about Lee Ambrozy, who spent the last three years translating Ai Weiwei’s Chinese blog into an English language book.

After Lee Ambrozy moved to Beijing in 2004, she quickly grew accustomed to the spectacle that trailed Ai Weiwei wherever he went. The first time she saw the artist and activist in person, he was accompanied by five video cameras. Some passersby cried out for “Teacher Ai”; others stopped to bow. But Ms Ambrozy, an art-history student with a social science background, could only laugh. The scene was like something from a Eugéne Delacroix painting — and Mr Ai, detained by Chinese officials earlier this month, was still a couple years from earning his musket and flag.

Then in 2008 she received a call from Mr Ai’s office. The artist was looking for a translator, someone who could turn his controversial blog into a book. “The caller immediately offered me the job,” Ms Ambrozy said over the phone. “Anyone who knew what they were doing would have asked for a sample translation or tried to set up a meeting. But she didn’t. She just sent me the text.”

Read the entire article here.

A few weeks ago, while suffering an acute case of freelancer’s vapours (it happens!), I received a phone call from Mike Watt. We talked about his new album, Hieronymous Bosch, and The Wizard of Oz. Then everything was okay. 

Here’s what happened:

When Mike Watt speaks, he screws his face upward, darts his eyes away, and raises his forearm to his brow, as if he’s about to close a flannel cloak around him. We see him do this throughout We Jam Econo, the 2005 documentary about his first band, ’80s art-core legends the Minutemen. But he isn’t hiding. Far from it. He’s inviting us into a world of his own making. It’s this place — his fertile imagination — that has fostered some of the most fascinating punk rock ever pressed to vinyl.

Startling mental connections abound in Watt, a 53-year-old from San Pedro. In his world, a Sammy Hagar record can inspire a punk rock koan (the title of the record Watt calls his best, Double Nickels on the Dime, which he recorded with the Minutemen in 1984); a burst perineal abscess can summon the spirit of Dante (as it did on Watt’s 2004 album, The Secondman’s Middle Stand); and people don’t talk, they “spiel” instead.

Read the entire article in the latest SF Weekly.