“Atp-ny-2010” (Used 5 times)

This past September WFMU traipsed up to Kutshers Resort in Monticello, New York for a third yearly broadcast of the grand All Tomorrow's Parties, and we were especially excited to be plugging in the recorders Friday night as we'd landed permission from Kim Salmon to broadcast and archive the legendary Scientists! Starting off as a Perth-based punk band of the 70s, a move to Sydney in the 80's (and eventually London) found the Scientists morphing into one of the best Australian bands of all time. Like kindred spirits the Gun Club, and fellow countrymen the Birthday Party, Salmon and company defined blooze-ooze and gutter dwelling while equally purveying a lofty sense of style and poetry; their timeless nature easily defined by putting on a platter like Blood Red River (played in its entirety this night), or seeing their image floating around the DNA of later bands like Mudhoney, Chrome Cranks, Blues Explosion and many more. At ATP, we heard rumors of minimal (or no) rehearsal, but from the first scrape of "Set It On Fire" the timespan seemed nonexistent and Salmon's yowl no less bone-rattling. Take a dig via the Free Music Archive, where you can check out more archived sets from WFMU's 2008, 2009 and 2010 broadcasts. You can also check the WFMU site and stream of some of the non-downloadable sets we aired from this year here, including Hallogallo, Sonic Youth, Mudhoney and White Hills.

Being a music festival, the experience at the ATP weekend isn't thoroughly grounded in any traditional sense of reality. Already seatbelting themselves into a commitment to a full work week's worth of entertainment, guests enjoy the supplemental bonus of attending the unsettlingly traditional Kutsher's Resort and Country Club, oasis of the Catskills 1970. Without any jursidiction from father time and mother space to keep anyone focused, a strong "No parents!" vibe rules the weekend and the fine line between "anything goes" and "WTF" disappears and reappears at random. Soon, Ron Jeremy's chumming it with your crew and you're being offered to smoke with DJ Kool Herc at 5 AM while Albini's poker tournament upstairs has yet to finish. It was easy to lose track of any sense about how the world works.

Much of ATP's and Jim Jarmusch's programming over the weekend dealt with performers in the psychedelic kingdom, audiences regularly careened into space on the extraplanetary saddles of guitar solo after guitar solo. At Fursaxa's turn at bat, backed up by cellist Helena Espvall and Mary Lattimore on full-size harp, they decided to forego the rocket ship method in favor of gently lofting the audience to the heavens on a hot air balloon stream of looped vocals and string accompaniments, finishing off the set with the stellar, seven minute "Sidhe," that seemed to mimic the sound of the 400 people all breathing together at a pace that deviated from any other point in the weekend. The effect took hold and left everyone in the ballroom completely inundated, many on their backs in "carpet angel" pose nowhere closer to reality.

Listen to the full 40 minute set below. Fursaxa's 2010 studio album on ATP Recordings, Mycorrizhae Realm, also features Epsvall and Lattimore.

Swedish psychedelic rock band Dungen (pronounced "dune-yen", not "Dungeon", as your Stryper-loving stepbrother may refer to them as) performed an awesome set at the Jim Jarmusch curated ATP last month in Monticello, New York.

While the set covered most of the band's discography, it centered around the group's awesome new LP, Skit i allt, which in English humorously translates to "Fuck it all." That title may have been a bit more appropriate for frontman Gustav Ejstes' early days as a hip hop artist, but there's something about it that's perfect for Dungen's music, which to me occasionally sounds like Eureka-era Jim O'Rourke playing with Selling England By The Pound-era Genesis.

Maybe only I hear that combination... but to me that sounds... awesome! Dungen can be a bit proggy, they can be a bit folky, a bit metal, and sometimes it even seems like in any minute Karen Carpenter might come up and grab the microphone from Gustav and start singing a Burt Bacharach-penned number, especially on "Marken Lag Stilla", from the newest album.

"Mina Damer Och Fasaner", from 2008's 4, was a particular highlight from the set, recalling Gentle Giant and Peter Gabriel (in a good way) and has been made available to download via WFMU below, engineered by Ernie Inradat. Unleash your inner prog nerd!

In July, Vivian Girls mainstays Kickball Katy and Cassy Ramone started working with new drummer Fiona Campbell. A former member of the New Zealand punk band Coolies, Fiona is now planted firmly in Brooklyn, where she's also one-half of submerged pop-jammers Coasting.

We had the chance to catch this revised lineup earlier this month when WFMU broadcast live from the third-annual NY edition of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival at Kutsher's Country Club. The three-piece tore through a set of classic material, hits from last year's s/t on In The Red, and new jams like "The Other Girls", featured below.

The full Vivian Girls ATP-NY set is available here, but we're not archiving the opening track because the mix was still falling into place. It's too bad because "Tell The World" is one of my all-time favorite songs -- seriously every time I pick up a bass I wanna play that riff! But, lucky for us, there is already an incredible live version of "Tell The World" available on the Free Music Archive pre-launch sampler #2.

This version was from Vivian Girls' 2008 WFMU session for Choking on Cufflinks. This session was recorded before the FMA launched, but WFMU posted mp3s to the blog after the set aired, and because WFMU likes to give live session commercial rights over to the artist, the recordings have since resurfaced in two for-sale editions: a limited CDR, and 12'' on Troubleman. Both are now sold-out, and I've seen the CD-R command upwards of $60 on eBay. 

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.