All Tomorrow's Parties

For the third year in a row, WFMU trekked up to Kutsher's Country Club in Monticello for the NY edition of the legendary All Tomorrow's Parties Festival. We're following up the live broadcast with a series of blog posts highlighting mp3s from the best of the fest.

Thurston Moore was one of the major players at the fest -- he joined this year's curator Jim Jarmusch for a Criterion cinema panel in the Sportsman's Lounge, then rocked a career-spanning set with Sonic Youth. And to top it all off, he played a special acoustic set followed by an electric-guitar duo with Bill Nace as Northampton Wools. The latter, a 20-minute epic named "Sweetness", evolves from a trembling cinematic soundscape into a volcanic eruption; as the lava-flow cools you take a look back to where it all began and realize, damn: the improv highlight of the whole fest.

This dissonant assault was preceded by a rare Thurston Moore solo performance on 12-string guitar. The original recording of "Circulation" can be found on a new release titled In Silver Rain with a Paper Key -- a hardcover monograph containing two seven-inch vinyl records, as well as art, photographs, lyrics, poetry and other texts from Moore's personal notebooks and visual archives. This is a new release on Ecstatic Peace Library, an imprint of the label Thurston founded in 1981.

Ecastic Peace releases (and Ecstatic Yod, the collaboration with Byron Coley) shine a broad-yet-narrowly focused light into the musical underground. So I thought it'd be fun to make a list of the artists who've released music through these labels and also have FMA profiles: Menstruation Sisters, Lydia Lunch (of Teenage Jesus & The Jerks), Michael Gira, Jaap Blonk, Nels Cline, Sightings, Mouthus, Gang Wizard, Okkyung Lee, Fursaxa, Magik Markers, Lambsbread, MV&EE, Pocahaunted, Robedoor, Samara Lubelski, James Twig Harper (of Nautical Almanac), Angels in America, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Paul Flaherty/Chris Corsano...happy digging, and for a full discography try Discogs [Ecstatic Peace] [Ecstatic Yod].

If you're looking for more free mp3s, try Thurston's Protest Records project, founded as a protest against United States' invasions in the middle east. The site offers free politicized stencils in addition to the archived mp3 compilation series.

and hey! Keep an eye on the FMA's Recently Added feed and Featured Blog for more highlights from ATP-NY, and check out ATP's FMA Portal for highlights from this & previous festivals.