A new season of Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich’s intimate, audience-less performance show From the Basement is set to premiere this summer, and so far the lineup sounds as big as we’ve come to expect: The Shins, Feist, and Red Hot Chili Peppers are just a few of the artists set to be featured.
“I think what happened was MTV came along in the ’80s and destroyed the way that people film music on television,” Godrich told EW in a recent interview. “The performance ended up in the edit, and it wasn’t very direct. It’s a selfish thing, really—as a music fan, I really wanted to see people performing on television, so we went ahead and did it. Musicians hate doing TV because it’s such a different world and a horrible environment for them, so wouldn’t it be cool for me as a music person to do a TV show? Then I could get something out of them that TV shows wouldn’t get.”
The new season will move into 3D territory, though Godrich assures EW it’s not gimmicky, and that it will still be available in standard definition on a number of platforms as well.
Radiohead had one of the best results from the tapings, even releasing their King Of Limbs performances as a DVD. Check out an advance clip of the Shins performing “Bait and Switch” on the show over at EW’s site.
photo via CBC
So, the guy from Portishead decided he wanted to make a hip hop album and this is it. The only question going into this project were whether the raps would step up to the plate to match what was sure to be, and is, some great beats. The answer is a resounding yes, as the collective doesn’t lean too heavily on any one rapper and thrives on flashes of excellence from over a score of separate acts. The 41-track monster of an album has loads of replay value which might come in handy considering the gaps of time Geoff Barrow and co. likes to wait between releases. 
The idea that Death Grips might be experimental hip hop is absurd. This is an example the pure raw unabashed hip hop; a bunch of dudes coming together using any sound or style to move the crowd, by any means necessary. Listening to Death Grips how you should might destroy your favourite speakers but it’ll be worth it. 
Future’s guest appearance on 2011's “Racks” blazed a path for the self-aware knucklehead to start actually stacking it up just like he says he does on that song. After a few mixtapes, here comes his album which features some of the popular songs. It’s a bit of a safe release but these anthems still boom, regardless of their age. Sprinkling them in along with the new ones makes this a perfect place to start for those unfamiliar with the mixtapes. 
One of the most impressive things about Stalley’s releases so far are the tight themes that hold them together. Stalley does a perfectly disjointed homage to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas as he tells a parallel story about his journey as a musician. He wins again with a set of lavishly-produced instrumentals as the back drop to paint his narrative upon. The concept mixtape is a fairly popular practice as they’re usually recorded in a briefer time period which allows the artists to stay in the same headspace. It’s a shame that this doesn’t carry over to albums more often. 
This PWYC release comes with some interesting tiered packages to reward those that spend more on the album. The $10,000 package comes with an opportunity to executive produce an EP with Del, barring artistic differences of course. Let’s face it, this is super weird but it’s great to see Del still around making great music. He’s doing what he has to do to keep it coming. 
Christaan Felber for The New York TimesGreenwood, right, and Thom Yorke during sound check before a Radiohead concert in Miami. 
On the morning of Sept. 12, 2011, a white Land Rover with a dragon on the door ferried the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, his longtime recording engineer Graeme Stewart and Radiohead’s co-manager Chris Hufford to Alvernia Studios, about an hour outside Krakow, Poland. For several years, when he’s not recording or touring with Radiohead, Greenwood has pursued a second career as a composer of orchestral music, and this day he was cutting new versions of two of his classical pieces, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” (17 minutes, inspired in part by the sound of radio static) and “48 Responses to Polymorphia,” both of which are unabashed tributes to the early-’60s output of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose compositions abandoned melody in favor of dense, dissonant tone clusters. Greenwood’s recordings will be featured on an album due out in March on Nonesuch Records, along with two new performances of Penderecki’s work conducted by Penderecki himself. 
Rock musicians’ ventures into film scores: a video round-up.
Greenwood's stage setup for a Radiohead show. Greenwood cites an early-’90s concert of Penderecki’s music as a conversion experience; he’s obsessed with Penderecki the way a lot of people are obsessed with Radiohead. Chances are you’ve heard Penderecki’s music even if you think you haven’t; some of his more screaming-of-the-damnedish pieces turned up on the soundtracks to “The Exorcist” and “The Shining,” and that’s his “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” seemingly ringing in Clive Owen’s ears during the long urban-warfare tracking shot near the end of “Children of Men.” So there was something full-circle about the Sept. 12 session, given that Greenwood owes his profile as a classical composer in large part to his work in film, particularly his deeply Penderecki-indebted score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” Alvernia Studios was founded in 2010 by the Polish radio mogul Stanislaw Tyczynski; it’s a full-service film production and postproduction studio that has six soundstages of varying massiveness. It is also a profoundly weird-looking place. This is because Tyczynski, in addition to being one of the richest men in Poland, is a huge fan of H. R. Giger, the Swiss artist/designer/night-terror-sufferer who’s most famous for creating the creepy biomechanical look of the aliens from the “Alien” movies. So nearly every inch of Alvernia has been modeled, at what looks like absurd expense, and with impressively bonkers disregard for the facility’s future resale value, on Giger’s work. All the hallways look like the birth canals of some extraterrestrial apex-predator with acid for blood. Even the men’s-room-door handles look like spinal columns. The complex itself is housed in 14 large domes linked by glass-enclosed tunnels; to get from one dome to another, you have to wait for a stone-faced, combat-booted security guard (no, seriously) to press his thumb to a keypad that opens a set of blast doors. Yet as I sat in the control room (itself styled like the bridge of a doomed spacecraft) and listened as Greenwood and Graeme Stewart engaged in some “Lost in Translation”-ish negotiations with the Polish engineer at the mixing console — a stern woman in socks and sandals, with a sensible soccer-mom haircut — the studio’s bizarre aesthetic seemed appropriate for what they were doing on this day. “Dry and close and uncomfortable is good,” Stewart told the engineer. (He was trying to persuade her not to run the sound of the orchestra through a reverb unit called a Lexicon — “dry” in this context meant “unprocessed.”) Greenwood tends to wince when he walks into a room, as if in anticipation of mortification to come. He was wearing a wrinkled white dress shirt; his black pants were tight but hung low on his hips; and his hair was a heedless mop. The overall schoolboy vibe was enhanced by the fact that he was still wearing his backpack, which contained a pinkish-orange T-shirt, a copy of the manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s graphic novel “Abandon the Old in Tokyo,” a MacBook and a spiralbound copy of the score for Penderecki’s “Polymorphia.” He’s 40, but he looks about 15; that’s roughly how old he was when he joined Radiohead, which makes me think back to someone who once suggested to me that when you join a band, you arrest at whatever age you were at that moment.
The singer, songwriter and guitarist Annie Clark, known as St. Vincent, at Bonnaroo. More Photos » 
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A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics. 
A festival fan in the wee hours of Sunday morning after the D.J. set by Skrillex. More Photos » The festival’s most newsworthy event was the return of D’Angelo, who made a great neo-soul album in 2000 and dropped out of sight a year later. His voice and charisma intact, he was singing funk and rock songs with a band led by Ahmir Questlove Thompson of the Roots. And the must-see set on Thursday night was by Alabama Shakes, whose songs reclaim all the spirit of 1960s soul music. This year’s Bonnaroo peaked early with a spectacular set on Friday night by Radiohead, which is more than ever a hard act to follow, especially when heard through Bonnaroo’s magnificent sound system. Radiohead made its songs jitter and crackle, with new electronic overlays and abstract funk rhythms dancing through paranoia and foreboding. Its backdrop was a two-story wall of lights, constructed from recycled water bottles, that flickered with geometric patterns as if enclosing the band within cybernetic space. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, on Saturday night, were pure musical sinew, an unstoppable, muscle-powered rhythm section knocking out rock and funk ideas from the 1960s through the 2000s, topping them with wild guitar and jumping all over the stage. Phish, Bonnaroo’s Sunday night finale, was in its most euphoric mode, leaning on the part of its repertory with roots in blues, funk and country; the pop-country hit maker Kenny Rogers, who had performed earlier on his own and with Lionel Richie, joined Phish on the huge stage to sing “The Gambler.” In a way, Bonnaroo 2012 was a holding action. Radiohead and Phish were returning headliners — Radiohead from 2006 and Phish from 2009 — and this year’s overall lineup did not quite equal that of previous years. But Bonnaroo is never monolithic. With more than 150 bands on five large stages, along with smaller ones scattered around its 700-acre grounds, Bonnaroo could be folky as well as funky; it also had pop, indie-rock, electronic dance music, oldies and comedy. A few performers, like Tune-Yards, did double duty, performing live soundtracks for silent films in a movie tent. When it began, Bonnaroo featured jam bands and their sources, and that foundation remains. The audience and vendors were awash in tie dye. Reminders to recycle and other environmental messages were omnipresent; the plastic cups could be composted. Performers cheerfully, or mockingly, addressed the crowd as “hippies.” And the Bonnaroo throng — about 80,000, many camped out on the grounds — is still ready to dance to everything from hip-hop to bluegrass. It’s an untrendy crowd, gathered for a good time. Yet the pop landscape has changed over the last decade, and Bonnaroo has adapted in its own way. While more specialized jam-band festivals have modeled themselves on Bonnaroo’s early years, the current festival’s lineup now overlaps more with those of other festivals; the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for instance, will also headline Lollapalooza in Chicago. And what originated as a once-a-year event in Tennessee is available for endless replays on YouTube. Some of the festival’s most enthusiastic audiences shouted along with the hip-hop chants of strong newcomers — the hedonistic Danny Brown, the pugnacious Yelawolf, the comical Das Racist and the socially conscious Kendrick Lamar — as well as with more established acts like the Roots, who have always been a robust live hip-hop band, and Ludacris, who brought a band of his own. The latest rediscovery of 1960s soul also played well at Bonnaroo: not just Alabama Shakes but also young bands backing mature soul singers like Sharon Jones (with the Dap-Kings) and Charles Bradley (with the Extraordinaires). Bonnaroo’s schedule still had plenty of room for jam bands like Phish, Dispatch and Umphrey’s McGee, who played in Saturday’s wee hours, from 2 a.m. to just before 6 a.m. The Word, an instrumental jam-band coalition, brought together the steel guitarist Robert Randolph, the keyboardist John Medeski and two members of the North Mississippi All-Stars. The groups steamed through tunes from gospel and Stevie Wonder. A good part of the Bonnaroo crowd savored instrumental passages as well as pop hooks. The meticulous arrangements of Bon Iver, with long stretches of hushed delicacy, held thousands of people transfixed when he played the main stage. White Denim, a band that goes barreling from tricky, musicianly structures to Texas boogie, drew roars of approval.
Damon Winter/The New York TimesA member of Pulp performing on Friday at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif. More Photos »
INDIO, Calif. — Well, in the end it’s a business. But so it is at the beginning, and in the middle. 
Sarah Lee Coldplay will perform in Madrid on Oct. 26 at a concert that will be streamed live on the Internet.
Radiohead Taipei Setlist01 LOTUS FLOWER
Damon Winter/The New York TimesCoachella started under gloomy skies, high winds and scattered showers in Indio, Calif.
Christopher Berkey for The New York TimesThom Yorke of Radiohead at the 2006 Bonnaroo Music an Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn.