Jeff Wichmann

In what is likely a statement of the painfully obvious, Jeff Wichmann said that his new album A?hhhhh!!!!! is "something that, as far as I can tell, no one's ever created before, which is a koto/trumpet album with a lot of electronic blips and bleeps."

And that's not all. "I wanted to create an experimental rock album using the koto and the trumpet, as opposed to recording a koto album" of traditional compositions, Wichmann said in a recent phone interview. "Most koto players just do that. I found that limiting ... ."

Wichmann, a former Quad Citian (and former Reader employee) now based in Chicago, will be headlining the official release show for A?hhhhh!!!!! at Rozz-Tox on October 26, and it's almost certain to be a unique experience. The trumpeter and koto player will be joined by guitarist Jeff Kmieciak (a bandmate in Tenki, which plans to release its final album next year) and, on at least one song, Konrad (the Quad Cities electronic-music artist whose remix of the title track is included on the new record).

Plume Giant

When I spoke by phone with Plume Giant's Nolan Green last week, the interview was scheduled for 10 a.m. in New York, where the folk-ish trio is based. I can't remember the last morning interview I had with a pop, rock, or indie musician, as those breeds tend to shy away from morning engagements. So what self-respecting musician is up at that hour?

"I'm ... currently booking a release tour and working like crazy on the PR for it," Green said. "I was actually already at a different meeting this morning, at 8 a.m."

This detail is not necessarily important or telling, but it illustrates that these May graduates from Yale are actively charting their course, including setting specific goals for sales. So while you probably haven't heard of the band - unless you attended its December show at Rozz-Tox, to which they'll be returning on September 21 - its members are working to change that.

The first thing to stress about Hello Quad Cities - Volume 1 is that as compilations go, it's strong from front to back and varied without feeling scattershot. The challenging format tends to result in well-intentioned hodgepodges of second-rate leftovers, but the tracks here - from 12 area bands - are all exclusive, and most were written specifically for the compilation. More importantly, while you might not find all of them to your liking, there isn't a weak link.

The second thing to emphasize is that if you're curious about the project, you shouldn't dawdle. The release is available only on vinyl, and a mere 350 copies were pressed. (Each album includes a download code, but there will be no separate digital or CD release.) And they'll only be sold at a pair of record-release shows, by the featured bands, and at Ragged Records.

Blues Control

If you haven't heard of the instrumental duo Blues Control, as an introduction let me try to describe the first two tracks from its Valley Tangents album, which was released in June.

"Love's a Rondo" is a jazzy, piano-based tune with one of the keyboard lines often matched by a fuzzy guitar whose frayed edges serve as a gentle contrast. The rhythms are laid-back and slightly exotic, and there's the feel of unhurried, purposeful improv.

"Iron Pigs" starts with beats followed by majestic, cheesy keyboards followed by scratchy, aggressive noise followed by a piano played on the left side. When it emerges, the lead guitar is expressive yet concise, and memories of that agitated opening quickly melt away.

The band will perform at Rozz-Tox on September 9, and, in an interview earlier this month, Lea Cho described its sound as "instrumental psych rock."

That's as brief a description as you'll get, but it's probably more instructive to repeat some of the more verbose attempts. TinyMixTapes.com wrote that Cho and Russ Waterhouse were "an anomaly to me for ages, and listening to their records only made things worse. Their particular mysticality is created with a deeply abstracted series of layers that end up feeling sublimely confounding alongside the various swoons and gritty feelings of transcendence ... ."

David Sampson of Cains & AbelsThe Facebook biography of the Chicago-based trio Cains & Abels is four words: "honest rock and roll."

That might sound glib, vague, evasive, or even a dig at other bands - and it is. But a truer explanation is that singer/songwriter/bassist David Sampson means it, and to expand on the idea would simply take too long. When I asked him a general question about the genesis of "Money" - from the band's gorgeously, patiently articulated My Life Is Easy album - he talked for more than four minutes.

He touched on how his fictional songs seemed to bring their specific sadnesses into his life, and how he decided - almost as a joke - to write happy songs to conjure a different vibe.

"One of the main troubles in my life is money," he said. He discussed how hip-hop artists rap about what they aspire to, and "if it works out, ... they've made it happen by talking about it. ... So I decided at one point that I should try to write some songs about how awesome it is to be wealthy, or at least comfortable financially."

He then deflated what had seemed a hopeful tale. "I ended up writing a song addressing money as a lover that spurned me," he said. "It didn't actually come out the way I intended it to."

Even Sampson's fantasies are weighed down by truth; he couldn't complete a tongue-in-cheek exercise in wish fulfillment.

SpindriftThe Los Angeles-based quintet Spindrift has developed a reputation for its cinematic sound - something that started with a score for a film that was then only an idea in the head of bandleader Kirpatrick Thomas: The Legend of God's Gun, which later became a 2007 feature written and directed by Mike Bruce. One track for that film was used in 2008's Hell Ride - executive-produced by Quentin Tarantino - and Thomas now has three additional film-score-composer credits with Spindrift.

But this tack for the band - playing at Rozz-Tox on May 19 - is a relatively recent development. Spindrift was formed in the early 1990s in Delaware, and was at that point an experimental psychedelic-rock band. It was only in 2001, when Thomas heard Ennio Morricone's music for the Sergio Leone classic Once Upon a Time in the West, that his band changed course.

Jeffrey Konrad

Jeffrey Konrad's Shadow Boxing, his second "official" release under the name Konrad, is all over a pop map written mostly in crayon, with keyboard cheese and drum machines aplenty. If the album weren't so layered and carefully constructed, it would be an easy mistake to dismiss many songs as amateurish outsider art produced largely on a synthesizer.

The wrongheadedness of that should be evident solely from "Hang-Ups," which foregoes electronics entirely for a poignant, country-tinged ballad that recalls Neil Young in its instrumentation and sleepy vibe. The two-line chorus is plainspoken but clear, with understated vocals that capture a character both self-aware and lost: "Getting over you has been difficult / 'Cause I'm faking it through my future." The verses are loaded with phrases both cryptic and evocative - "Open season on the polygraph," "Shadow-boxing with the angel of death."

Matt Hart

Philosophy wouldn't seem to lead naturally to poetry, but it can if you find the right philosopher. For Cincinnati-based poet Matt Hart - who will be reading from his work on Saturday at Rozz-Tox along with poets from the Quad Cities edition of the national journal Locuspoint - it was the 20th Century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Hart fell in love with poetry as an undergraduate at Ball State University, but he studied philosophy. Pursing a graduate degree in the subject at Ohio University, though, "I really bought Wittgenstein hook, line, and sinker. As a result, I quit doing philosophy. One of his main ideas is that philosophy is a sort of mental illness; if you understand him, you quit doing it."

And Wittgenstein offered an alternative to philosophy's relentless rational argument, writing that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry."

Erik Hall. Photo by David Sampson.

Less than a minute into In Tall Buildings' 2010 self-titled debut is a moment that hints at Erik Hall's cut-and-paste method. New vocal lines burst abruptly from beneath the previous ones, as if overeagerly jumping their cue. But the music is so carefully constructed that it's obvious this was a choice rather than a mistake, and the effect in an otherwise patient and gentle song is the understanding of a clear vision behind the music.

The album was crafted over four years, Hall said in a phone interview this week promoting his February 15 performance at Rozz-Tox. "I didn't push it at all," he said. "I didn't work on it unless something came to me, unless I had an idea that I knew I wanted to apply to the music that I was already working on. So it was very gradual."

While the album's gestation period was long by music-industry standards, Hall's composing and recording approaches were particularly unusual. He started out with a backbone - a chord progression or rhythmic pattern - and recorded it for the final product. "That's it," he said. "It's not like a demo. ... Sometimes I have to sit and live with that for a good while before I figure out where the vocals are going to come from, what the song is going to be about, and what else sonically it needs." He added with a laugh: "That can take anywhere from a week to a year."

Wet Hair.For Wet Hair singer and keyboardist Shawn Reed, being experimental is the only thing he can do. "Unless it's weird and challenging, I'm just bored with it," he said in a phone interview this week. "It just doesn't feel important to me."

The surprise of last year's In Vogue Spirit was that the Iowa City band produced a batch of songs that was - for it - downright poppy.

That might seem like a contradiction unless you're familiar with Wet Hair's previous work, or the output of Reed's and bandmate Ryan Garbes' previous noise-rock outfit Raccoo-oo-oon. Pitchfork.com wrote that "in both Raccoo-oo-oon and Wet Hair, Garbes and Reed have been uncompromising in their pursuit of the outer limits. ... That hasn't changed. But with In Vogue Spirit, Garbes and Reed have delivered a more consistent, considered record. Space is still the place, but they've found shortcuts to getting there."

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