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/

In conti​nuing​ with the remix​ proje​ct I'm calli​ng Spool​work,​ I just uploa​ded my submi​ssion​ to Ye Olde Radio​head Remix​ Conte​st.​ The band broke​ down their​ song "​Recko​ner"​ into sever​al track​s (​guita​rs,​ piano​,​ bass,​ drums​,​ vocal​s,​ etc.​)​,​ for remix​ers to play with,​ but I just took Mr. Yorke​'​s vocal​ track​ and added​ all of my own instr​ument​ation​.​ If you'​d like to give it a liste​n (and maybe​ even vote for it, eh?​)​,​ just scrol​l down to the "​Vote For My Recko​ner Remix​"​ box on the Dave Fischoff Myspace page or the Spool​work Myspa​ce page:​

http://myspace.com/spoolwork

And if you'​d like to hear what lots and lots of other​s have done,​ swing​ your ears on over here:​

http://remixradiohead.com

I'm happy to say the backing band and I are hitting the road the last week of March to play a few shows in towns I haven't been to in awhile. Here's what it looks like:

03/24/08 Ypsilanti, MI - The Elbow Room 
03/25/08 Lexington, KY - The Dame 
03/26/08 Charleston, SC - The Tin Roof 
03/27/08 Chapel Hill, NC - Jack Sprat 
03/28/08 Washington, DC - The Red and the Black 
03/29/08 Columbus, OH - Cafe Bourbon Street 

If you live in any of these places, please come on out and say hi! The shows will feature songs from my last two albums, and a brand new tune that hasn't even been recorded yet. I'll be joined on stage by a full backing band: Matt Hallock on bass, Chris Kolodziej on drums and laptop, and Sharon Shattuck on viola. Hope to see some of you!

I recently did an interview with the Scottish blog Heaven or Las Vegas and it's been posted for your reading pleasure. In it, we discuss my past and future music, my new remix and production project (Spoolwork), and the challenges of translating the songs on The Crawl to a live band, among other things. If you'd like to take a look, it's available right here:

Heaven or Las Vegas interview

I just started a new remix and production project I'm calling Spoolwork, and 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

And if you'd like to download a copy of the Jens remix, you can also grab it on my Spoolwork Myspace page:

Spoolwork Myspace page

I've just started a new remix and production project called Spoolwork, and to kick things off 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!

Hey, so I gearing up to hit the road for a Midwest mini-tour with Jens Lekman starting tomorrow, but I wanted to quickly pass along a piece of news- The NPR program Weekend America is graciously using some of their airtime to do a profile on me and my music, and it's scheduled to air this Saturday, Nov. 3. Unfortunately, the show doesn't air everywhere (for instance, Chicago), so if you can't tune it in on your radio but would still like to hear it, it'll be archived right over here:

Weekend America story

I just finished my contribution to the Secretly Canadian podcast series and it's posted up if you'd care to have a listen. The label asked if I'd like to put together a little audio documentary about all the music I've made up to this point, and I said yes, absolutely, totally, I will. The result is a 45 minute exploration of everything I've released with the label, from my earliest 4-track sound collage experiments in the mid-90s to the electronic orchestrations of The Crawl. If you'd like to hear it (along with all of the past and future SC podcasts, including contributions from Damien Jurado, The Earlies, David Vandervelde, Early Day Miners and Danielson, among others) just follow this link:

Secretly Canadian Podcast

and subscribe through the podcast outlet of your choice at the top of the page (iTunes, Yahoo, Google or Feedburner). The page also features loads of free mp3s and videos from us Secretly Canadianers. Nice!

I'm very excited to say that I just posted a brand new video on my Myspace page and it's yours for the viewing if you'd like to stop by for a visit (you can find it right under the "About Dave Fischoff" section). It's for the song "Small Drifts" from my new album The Crawl, and the visuals are made up almost entirely of Super-8 footage my grandfather Joseph Fischoff shot in the 1940s and 1950s. The Super-8 film was captured digitally and edited together by L.A. filmmaker Sean U'Ren, who I think did a fantastic job of matching the visuals with the rhythm and tone of the song.

So yeah, stop on by and let me know what you think. Or if you'd like to tell the world, you can watch the video and then rate and comment on it at YouTube, right here:

"Small Drifts" on YouTube

There's also a much cleaner, non-YouTubeified looking version right here:

much better looking version of "Small Drifts"

Dear Myspace friends old and new,

I just wanted to let everyone know that this Thursday, March 8, KCRW is featuring my song "Rain, Rain, Gasoline" on their "Today's Top Tune" podcast. What does this mean exactly? Well, for 24 hours (no more, no less) you'll be able to go to the L.A. radio station's website (also home to the famed Morning Becomes Eclectic show) and download this song of mine for free. Absolutely and completely, no strings attached. Just follow this link, then click the "podcast" button and let the fun begin:

Today's Top Tune