I'll be taking over the East Village Radio airwaves once again this Saturday, October 31, for a full-on fright-fest of ghoulish grooves and monster jams. You can listen to my Halloween DJ set live from 10am to Noon EST, or check out the archived edition afterwards. It's all available right over here:

Spoolwork on East Village Radio

I'll be taking over the Sandy Acres Sound Lab Show on East Village Radio this Saturday, August 15, from 10am to Noon EST. Soul, funk, disco, garage rock, old school hip hop, new wave and French and Brazilian pop will all be in attendance. Tune in live or listen to the archive right over here:

I've got a regular DJ gig in Brooklyn now- The 2nd Tuesday of every month will find yours truly providing a wide range of good time party sounds at the Huckleberry Bar in Williamsburg. I'll be spinning soul, funk, disco, hip-hop, new wave and garage rock, among other things. My upcoming dates in 2009 are:

The Myspace music player still doesn't seem to want allow free downloads, so I've taken matters into my own hands. All of the Spoolwork remixes are meant to be available as free downloads, and I've embedded a widget in the "Band Members" section of this Myspace page so you can do just that. Simply click on the play button and download to your heart's content.

The blog Culture Bully asked if I'd like to put together a Top 5 list for their end of the year extravaganza. I didn't think I'd have much new to add to the lists of favorite albums/songs already out there, so I went with a looser approach and just came up with 5 music-related things that I discovered, experienced, or just plain enjoyed in 2008. The official posting is here:

http://www.culturebully.com/top-musical-moments-of-2008-part-one-guest-list

...or you can just read below. Happy New Year everyone!

Five of My Favorite Music Things in 2008


1. Dave Tompkins

Dave Tompkins is a music writer I found out about this year. I was at the Printers' Ball, a once-a-year Chicago event where you can check out bands and DJs and load up on all the free magazines you want. I picked up an copy of Stop Smiling, their "Hip Hop Nuggets" issue, and there was a story in it by Mr. Tompkins called "The Night Time Master Blaster." He starts by talking about the time his friend collapsed on the front lawn from an asthma attack, then explains how this led to his discovery of electrofunk. It's a personal essay that also doubles as a brief history of the Vocoder. Which, of course, couldn't be more appropriate reading in 2008, the year of the Autotune. You can read it online here:

http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=788&page=1


2. "Playing the Building" by David Byrne

This was a musical instillation that David Byrne set up in the Battery Maritime Building in New York this year. He put an old church organ in the middle of an empty warehouse and ran wires from the back of the organ to the windows, radiators, plumbing and other surfaces inside the space. The organ was set up so that any time a key was pressed, an electrical signal traveled down one of the wires to a little machine that would tap on a window, buzz in a radiator, or blow air through a pipe like a giant flute. Anyone could come in, sit down at the organ and literally play the building. There are photos and video of the piece on his website:

http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/art_projects/playing_the_building/


3. Cassette From My Ex

Jason Bitner, one of the guys who started Found Magazine, has a new website project he's calling Cassette From My Ex. The idea is simple and great: he asks various musician/artist/writer types to pull out that mixtape from an old flame that's still tucked away in the bottom of a shoebox or the back of a desk drawer and share it with the rest of the world. Each mix is streaming in its entirety on the website, along with the homemade artwork and handwritten tracklistings that make these things still beautiful for the ears and the eyes. And the person sharing gives a guided tour behind the events that led to the tape being made in the first place. Mostly, they're stories of young love, when relationships are funny and sad and awkward and wonderful and summed up perfectly in pop songs. The website is right over here:

http://www.cassettefrommyex.com/


4. Mark Ronson's Authentic Shit show on East Village Radio

This isn't a 2008-specific thing, but it's the first year I started listening regularly to this podcast. Mark Ronson is a big time producer (Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen, Kaiser Chiefs), but there's absolutely nothing slick or professional about his radio show, and I mean that in the best way possible. He hardly ever lets a song play through without breaking in to make some comment, and sometimes when he realizes he's been talking too long he'll just start the track back at the beginning. I know this sounds like it could be completely annoying, but I find it really endearing- he's just so damn excited about the music he's playing and he wants you to be excited, too. It's like that friend you had in middle school, the one who'd come over with a new record for the stereo, put in on, and proceed to give a riff-by-riff analysis, never missing a note on his air guitar. The podcast is available here:

http://eastvillageradio.com/modules.php?name=evrshow&showid=69


5. Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell

I moved to New York this year, and one of the first things I did was head over to the MoMA for a screening of this documentary about Arthur Russell. I first got into Arthur Russell's music through his cello songs, where he uses his cello to accompany his voice the way most people would use a piano or a guitar. It's such a beautiful and unique sound, but it's only one of the musical personas he came up with in his short but very prolific life. I don't think he saw many boundaries when it came to genre, and he seemed to think it was perfectly natural to float between pop, rock, disco, folk and modern classical. There's a scene in the film of him walking around New York with his Walkman and I can only imagine how excited he'd be if he'd lived long enough to have an iPod. A whole world of shuffling, blurring genres, all of it equally exciting and good. The film's website where you can watch the trailer is here:

http://www.arthurrussellmovie.com/

I just uploaded my submission to Ye Olde Radiohead Remix Contest. The band broke down their song "Reckoner" into several tracks (guitars, piano, bass, drums, vocals, etc.), for remixers to play with, but I just took Mr. Yorke's vocal track and added all of my own instrumentation. If you'd like to give it a listen (and maybe even vote for it, eh?), just scroll down to the "Vote For My Reckoner Remix" box on the Spoolwork Myspace page. And if you'd like to hear what lots and lots of others have done, swing your ears on over here:

http://remixradiohead.com

For those of you who prefer the Facebook to the Myspace, I just set a Facebook Group page for any and all things Spoolwork-related. If you'd like to join in the fun, it's happening right here:

SPOOLWORK FACEBOOK PAGE

XLR8R featured my remix of Jens Lekman's "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" in their Top 10 new tracks this week! Here's what they had to say:

"Just in time for Valentine's Day, Swedish indie-pop romantic Jens Lekman unleashes this downer of a track to the blogosphere. Secretly Canadian artist Dave Fischoff (a.k.a. Spoolwork) remixes the mournful love song, letting the music build slowly before it explodes into the quotable phrase, "I'm leaving you because I don't love you." I think I'll break up with someone just for the excuse to play this track on repeat."

Here's a link to the original posting:

XLR8R's top 10

Pitchfork had some nice things to say today about my remix of Jens Lekman's "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You." Here's a link to the original posting:

Pitchfork posting

And here's what they had to say:

Jens Lekman songs are often not just influenced by the music that inspires him, like the Rolling Stones borrowing Chuck Berry riffs, but actually built around samples from the stuff. So it's intriguing to imagine what a tune like, say, Oh You're So Silent Jens's "Black Cab" would sound like backed by something other than the harpsichord from the Left Banke's "I've Got Something on My Mind". Lekman's Secretly Canadian labelmate Dave Fischoff got the opportunity to do a similar alternate-universe take on Night Falls Over Kortedala's "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You", but without the benefit of knowing what the album version would ultimately sound like. Lekman gave Fischoff just the vocal track and left him to build the rest of the song structure and arrangement from there.

For the first remix under his new Spoolwork pseudonym, Fischoff gives "I'm Leaving You..." a dramatic, closing-credits feel. Gone are the tropics-tinged beats Lekman samples from fellow Swedes the Tough Alliance's "Take No Heroes", and the sped-up backing vocals; gone, too, are the chintzy keyboards and orchestral touches he puts above them. In a clever move, Fischoff's version starts with some decidedly un-Lekman-like distortion, but the most prominent differences at first come in the busier beats, bedroom-Spector grandeur, and chirping synths. Then there's the chorus, less a sigh of regret than a cinematic fare-thee-well, with a surging chord progression and ringing flourishes that may have a ghost of "Born to Run" in them. No way Lekman would ever sing about wanting to die in an "everlasting kiss," though.

-Posted by Marc Hogan on Mon: 01-21-08: 10:45 AM CST

To kick off this Spoolwork project, I've put together a remix of Jens Lekman's "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You." The original version of the song appears on his new album Night Falls Over Kortedala. I put this remix together before I'd ever heard the original, building all of the music around a vocal track that Jens sent me. Jens and I are both really happy with the way it turned out and if you'd like to hear it for yourself, it's available for downloading on the Spoolwork Myspace page. See what your ears think:

http://myspace.com/spoolwork

Feel free to add Spoolwork as a friend if you'd like to get future updates about this project. And if you're a band or a solo artist looking for someone to do some remix work, or put together an arrangement or a beat for one of your songs, feel free to drop me a line through the Spoolwork Myspace page. This first one was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to doing more work like it!