One of my close friends, Tyler Martin, has a band called James Rabbit.

I met Tyler at UC Santa Cruz. We’d talk about music and bedroom recording and for a bit played together in a band called Nicky and His Dreamers. After college Tyler moved into an old, half-condemned house on Blackburn St nicknamed The Crystal Palace (after the sheets of glass our friend Jamie Burkart once lined it with). The talent pouring from that house was amazing. For a couple years I lived in the house and played with the band. It was one of the best times in my life. As much as I grow as a musician, the talent coming out of James Rabbit is always leagues ahead of me, always blowing my mind, always setting an impossible standard.

Since starting the band when he was a 16-year-old high school student in Fresno, CA he has released over 60 full-length, incredibly imaginative, weird, and catchy-as-all-hell indie-pop albums. Yes, over sixty. Are they all good? Well, many of them were released in such limited runs that they’re no longer available. But if you want to get a sense, you’re in luck because they just released their first greatest hits collection, entitled Express.

Download Express for free now.

We’re playing this super nice show next Thursday. This is your last chance to catch Just Another Snake Cult perform in Iceland for a while.

Both Snorri Helgason and Nolo have recently put out great new albums.

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/305036292866629/

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/342798192401092/

Just Another Klikk Cult is brutal and heavy.

Here’s the Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/334289973264249/

Bandcamp:

or Gogoyoko:

This track was originally released as Experiments In Bedroom Pop #3. Go here if you’d like to sign up and receive future tracks in the series.

When: Friday, October 28, 2011 — show starts at 5:30PM sharp!

Where: Harpa Kaldalón

Who: Just Another Snake Cult and Sykur

What: The debut of a new concert series presented by Harpa and 12 Tónar entitled Undiraldan (Undercurrents)

Cost: Free of charge!

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=296013653749654

To kick things off, The Line of Best Fit dubbed Just Another Snake Cult among the Iceland Airwaves: Five bands you must see:

[...] mixes Brian Wilson with Ariel Pink and comes up with something truly compelling and original. Just Another Snake Cult’s sound pulls off that rare and peculiar trick of balancing the right influences with just enough originality to blow minds and capture hearts. We like this a lot.

KEXP Session at KEX Hostel (photo: Michael Matynka)

Our first show of the week was a live session for KEXP Seattle at KEX Hostel, where our “big group played an endearingly ramshackle set [...] with just about any instrument you could find.” Check out more of the nice things they have to say and great photos on their blog. The stage sound was a little difficult (low resonances, feedback — stuff that comes with the territory of being a nine-person band), but the recording quality is fantastic. You can listen to our entire set at our KEXP session archive.

This was followed by a string of off-venue performances. At Barbara there was no backline at all, so we performed acoustic without Ási our drummer and had a great time of it. At Reykjavík Backpackers the mixer powering their sound system was on the fritz — it took half our set before we’d shook enough dust out of the thing that all the channels came through. But again, we had fun. At Kaffistofan the jerry-rigged P.A. didn’t look promising, but it held up and to our surprise the sound was great.

Amsterdam on-venue (photo: Magnús Andersen)

At this point we were looking forward to playing a real venue, with decent sound. The sound check at Amsterdam was a little disconcerting as a number of the power outlets on the stage were dead, they still needed to round up another D.I., and there wasn’t room for all of us actually on stage. Nonetheless, we managed to get a good sound. By the time we hit the stage that night though, all the mixing board settings from soundcheck had been tossed, one of the monitors was dead, nothing came through right, there weren’t enough working channels left on the board for the band, and between each song the sound guy ran up to tell us that something new had crapped out.  We made the best of it.  In their review, the Reykjavík Grapevine noted that we left “the audience to endure a 10-minute sound check,” but that then “the keyboard and guitar drove the North English sound along, with the saxophone laying down some fine grooves. Quite fitting music for a small venue like Amsterdam, and the crowd was more than happy to stomp along to it.” Stereogum has assured me that their scathing review of an unnamed Icelandic band was not directed towards us.

The Line of Best Fit (photo: Sébastien Dehesdin)

Sunday was the longest day — traveling around Reykjavík (and Mosfells) with a gang from La Blogothèque recording song after song for an extended Take Away Show. In between we fit in a cold and windy roof-top session for The Line of Best Fit.  It was really fun working with them both.  I can’t wait to see video from all three–La Blogotheque, The Line of Best Fit, and KEXP.  Will post them as they come!

Our intensive schedule didn’t leave much time or energy for show-going (let alone that seeing many bands entails either waiting in a queue for an hour or showing up hours early and waiting inside the venue) and so I missed out on a lot of bands that I would have liked to have seen. Of what I saw, the highlight of the festival was Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band. Her music (or specifically, her singing) is something that dares do something different. Was it good? I don’t know. But it burned itself onto my brain in a way music generally does not do. More music should strive to be so striking, and in such a human way. Couple that with like the coolest backing band ever — double-drummers (one of which was Greg Sonier of Deerhoof!), Sean Lennon, etc etc. It was pretty sweet. Tune-Yards even came on stage mid-set, which I have great footage of, but no steady internet connection to upload it.  The Reykjavík Grapevine actually has a good review of this show, if you’re still curious.

I don’t think I can give an overview of the foreign bands playing at Airwaves. Anyway, it’d be far more unbalanced and biased than my overview of the Icelandic bands. Instead I’ll just share with you what I’m going to do. Here’s my Thursday.

I’m going to see Kira Kira because I never have.

Then we’re heading over to Reykjavík Backpackers hostel and playing there (a little earlier than originally scheduled probably).

Then I’m going to bolt down to catch the Chimera Music acts at Harpa Norðurljós.

This show kicks off at 8PM with The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, which is a Sean Lennon psych-pop duo with a lady named Charlotte Kemp Muhl. Cooooool. I’ll probably miss this unfortunately.

They are followed by a band called Fig, which is a new project of Yuka C. Honda (Cibo Matto) and Nels Cline (Wilco). I don’t know more, but there’s a clip on their site that sounds cool. I’ll probably miss this as well.

Then comes Consortium Musicum at 10pm. This is what I most want to see at Airwaves this year. This is a noisy experimental duo between Greg Sonier (drummer of Deerhoof) and Sean Lennon. Bring your ear plugs. I’ll probably miss most if not all of this, unfortunately.

They’re followed by MI-GU, which is a band lead by the drummer from Cornelius and Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band.

And finally at 11:40pm comes Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band. Legendary. Doesn’t need any more description.

If you stay for Yoko Ono, you’re missing out on Yacht and Secret Chiefs 3 — all playing at the same time.

Yacht came out of a music scene I was really into for a while during my more formative years. Haven’t kept up on his stuff lately though.

Secret Chiefs 3 is an instrumental band with members from Mr Bungle, and I think that gives a pretty good guide to how they sound.