News for Now
Portland stays weird on IFC, Megafaun gets even more epic, and Joanna Newsom hits the road.
While I am and always will be a Midwesterner at heart, I've got to say that living in Portland definitely has its perks. Like possibly getting to be on the new IFC series Portlandia (which sounds super majestic, but is really just the name of a statue downtown). Carrie Brownstein (of Sleater-Kinney fame) and Fred Armisen (SNL) have comically performed together for quite some time as ThunderAnt, and they're taking their sketch selves over to IFC to film a show about Portland and all of the weirdness that exists in this city. I'm not totally sold on it, but as long as they have the feminist bookstore owners that were featured in St. Vincent's "Laughing With a Mouth of Blood" video, I'll be checking it out. This genuinely excites me--Megafaun and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) covering field recordings of old folk and blues songs. I say "field recordings" because the tracks they're covering (off a series of LPs called Sounds of the South) were collected by an ethnomusicologist. These are literally sonic artifacts, about to be reimagined by some extremely talented people. They'll be performing the covers in a concert series that runs from September 17-19 in Durham, NC. If you can't make it though, don't worry--it'll become a live album in 2011. Speaking of the south, Joanna Newsom's heading there come early November. She'll be hitting up Arizona, Texas, New Orleans, Florida, and finally heading up to Carnegie Hall to wrap things up.Posted by Alyssa Vincent on Aug 24, 2010 @ 9:09 am