Pitchfork

The weekend of March 27-28, 2009, soon-to-be-sweaty throngs looking to dance will make their annual bee-line to Miami for the Ultra Music Festival. The 11th annual Ultra fest goes down at the city's Bicentennial Park, bringing with it performances from Bloc Party, Cut Copy, Santogold, Crystal Castles, Simian Mobile Disco, Hercules & Love Affair, Roni Size & Reprazent (in their first Stateside appearance in seven years), the Presets, Busy P, the Ting Tings, Deadmau5, and Tiesto. In addition to performing twice, Carl Cox will host a "Carl Cox and Friends" arena with an ultrasecret group of as-yet-unannounced special guests. 

Overlooked Swedish songwriter Kristian Matsson, aka the Tallest Man on Earth, heads off on a three-week tour of the U.S. starting tonight (December 9) in New York City. A number of the dates on the tour are with Bon Iver.

In other news, the Tallest Man recently released this year's Shallow Grave in vinyl and digital formats in North America via Mexican Summer. The LP edition is limited to 1,000 copies.

Photo by Autumn de Wilde

The dawn of a new year seems as good a time as any for a band like Annuals to kick off a brand new tour, and so it will be in January, when the North Carolinian set hits North America for a little more than a month. They will be joined at every turn by young Ohioan Jessica Lea Mayfield-- whose recent With Blasphemy So Heartfelt is worth more than a few spins as the weather turns sour-- and What Laura Says, who will represent Annuals' own Terpsikhore imprint.

Mayfield has a few Annuals-less dates of her own before she joins in on all the Fun.

Photos by Shannon McClean; Above: Melvins

So yeah, I suppose these guys would give me bad dreams too. Put 'em together and you've got the 2008 edition of All Tomorrow's Parties' The Nightmare Before Christmas, which haunted perennial party spot Butlins Holiday Centre in England over the long weekend.

Assembled by the deft curatorial hands of Mike Patton and the Melvins, the seasonal freakout scared together the likes of Os Mutantes, Mastodon, Fennesz, Squarepusher, Butthole Surfers, Kool Keith, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Meat Puppets, Isis, the Black Heart Procession, Dälek, Torche, the Damned, Leila, Rahzel, White Noise, Bernard Parmegiani, Monotonix, Porn featuring Thurston Moore, Fugazi's Joe Lally, and a reunited Boss Hog, as well as a full-album performance of The Director's Cut by Patton's Fantômas. Somebody pinch me, I must be screaming.

Melvins




Fantômas




Mastodon




Butthole Surfers




Meat Puppets


Fennesz


The Damned




Monotonix




Os Mutantes




Porn [ft. Thurston Moore]




Teenage Jesus and the Jerks




Squarepusher




Kool Keith

Um, yeah.

But you know what? If Kanye's right, I gotta hand it to U2. That would be one ballsy move. Handing over the keys to the biggest rock band in the world to the guy behind "My Humps" and "I Got It From My Mama" is even riskier than letting the Edge mumble over industrial music or busting out a giant lemon for a world tour. Could it work? Maybe. But if it failed spectacularly, it would be FUCKING HILARIOUS.

Mark Kozelek, it would seem, is a man with a heart of gold and a surplus of sweet swag lying about. How else to explain the Sun Kil Moon/Red House Painters master-melancholic's participation in yet another charity auction, his second this year?

July found the Koz selling off some old (blue?) guitars for the benefit of the American Red Cross and Midwestern flood victims, while this month Mark traded pick for pen and autographed a bunch of cool stuff to aid the West Memphis Three, the trio of then-teens believed wrongfully convicted of a 1993 triple homicide and imprisoned (and a favorite cause of more than a few musical types).

The auction runs from now until December 18 (bid here), and includes a number of CDs and LPs, a concert poster, and copies of the Nights of Passed Over lyrics book, all bearing Kozelek's signature. Proceeds go to the West Memphis Three's defense fund.

As if Mark weren't being generous enough already, he's also streaming the entirety of his covers/rarities collection The Finally LP on his MySpace right now. That set hits stores tomorrow (December 9) via Mark's own Caldo Verde imprint, and even the cows on the cover look kinda glum.

This year has been an impressive one for the gents of Tokyo Police Club, what with the release of their debut LP Elephant Shell, lotsa big-time touring (including a stint with Weezer), and their recent Wisteria Lane residency as seen on "Desperate Housewives" (scope the clip here).

The Ontario outfit will cap the year as part of the "Jingle Bell Rock" tour of Canada, and get into the swing of 2009 early with a pretty expansive late winter tour of the States. TPC will also hit up CBS on Wednesday (December 10) for an apperance on "The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson".

Once the live stuff wraps, they'll split their time between crafting the follow-up to Elephant Shell and raiding the TiVo for the next program to plunder. May we suggest...

They're a Canadian band (Montreal!) of a certain size (six!), which makes Bell Orchestre a prime candidate for inclusion into the fold at Arts & Crafts, home to such large Canadian troupes as Broken Social Scene, the Hidden Cameras, and, er, honorary Canadians Los Campesinos!

As you might recall, Belle Orchestre is comprised of the Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry and Sarah Neufeld, plus Stefan Schenider and Pietro Amato of Jorane, Mike Feuerstack of snailhouse, and Kaven Nabatian. The group will issue their as-yet-untitled follow-up to 2005's Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light early next year. They crafted the album with Tortoise's John McEntire at Chicago's Soma Electronic Music Studios.

Once their Arts & Crafts debut is out, the band will hit the road, hard. A few dates have emerged thus far, if that's the sort of thing that rings your proverbial bell.

Brian Wilson will release a companion DVD to this year's California-themed album That Lucky Old Sun early next year. Also titled That Lucky Old Sun, the DVD features a full live performance of the album at Capitol Studios and a feature-length documentary called Going Home, about the making of the record and Wilson's return to Capitol Records.

The DVD also features a track-by-track commentary on the live performance from Wilson and songwriting partner Scott Bennett, behind-the-scenes footage from the That Lucky Old Sun recording sessions, Wilson's "Black Cab Sessions" set, a performance and audience Q&A recorded for Yahoo! Music, and an interview with Zooey Deschanel as part of MySpace's "Artist on Artist" series.

Extensive commentary and interviews, huh? That should be interesting.

Capitol/EMI will release the That Lucky Old Sun DVD on January 27.

Wilson's only scheduled appearance right now is at the premiere of the yet-to-open GRAMMY Museum's "An Evening With" series on January 15. Museum Executive Director Robert Santelli will interview Wilson, and then Wilson will perform "a few songs," according to a press release.

Photo by Michael Alan Goldberg

Déjà vu? In January of this year, we reported that Cursive would be playing a few wintertime gigs to break up the sessions for their follow-up to 2006's Happy Hollow. Well, here we are some 11 months later, and Cursive have announced that they're playing a few wintertime gigs to, you know, break up the studio sessions for the next Cursive album.

A recent newsletter does indeed mention that Cursive are "finishing up the new record" and a note on their website suggests the mixing is complete but a few tweaks have yet to be made, so you should probably expect only a few more tours (namely a promised "nationwide" jaunt and a make-up trip to Europe) before the new Cursive long-player hits your stereo.