WFMU : Where dead air lives

Earlier this year, Kurt Gottschalk described seeing 4 young people -- who looked like they were born in 1990 -- playing music in the vein of No New York 1978. Could these teenagers even know about Teenage Jesus & The Jerks? Kurt might have wondered. The group was opening for Brown Wing Overdrive at Cake Shop, and they called themselves The Sediment Club.

I realized that was WFMU / FMA volunteer Austin's band, and -- to answer Kurt's question (which I get the sense had already been answered by the end of the Sediment Club's Cake Shop set) -- Yes, they know their shit from James Chance to James Brown, everything under the Sun Ra. I know this first hand because Austin spent much of last summer digitizing WFMU live sessions by the likes of The Magic Carpathians, Hat City Intuitive, and Alan Vega. On top of that, his parents played in groups like the Bush Tetras and the Voidoids, so they probably have some of the coolest record collections around. And the entire Sediment Club was excited to perform in the same WFMU live room that had recently played host to The Damned and Chrome Cranks (who Club member Amina cited as one of her favorite bands of all time!).

The Sediment Club don't just listen to great music, they meld their broad ranging influences into something original and great in its own right. The group features Austin on guitar and vocals, Lazar on bass and accompanying vox, Jack on drums, and Amina on synth. They played ten originals and two covers (Pere Ubu/Rocket From The Tombs' "Life Stinks" and The Residents' "Hello Skinny"), which you can hear in the WFMU streaming archive.

All 10 originals are here on the FMA. Some of these tunes have been recorded already, and will hopefully see an official release in the near future. Others were brand new, including "Derail Clean Slate God", on which Austin trades his skronk guitar for a contact-mic'ed hand saw run through a delay pedal.

Sediment Club is playing this Friday at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, and August 29th at Brooklyn's Market Hotel. Details here on their myspace, along with streaming audio from their forthcoming studio recording