CMJ
Saturday, September 17 2005 - 0 Comments
It's CMJ week in New York and, as I read somewhere else, it's like a city with an excessive amount of shows to begin with deciding not to do anything else whatsoever but music for a couple of days. Thursday was my day of excess. KEXP comes to town for every CMJ and broadcasts from The Museum of Television & Radio where they have 3-4 in-studio performances per day in addition to the regular old radio show format. You can sign up to stop by for the in-studio sessions, so I went to The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellars (excellent band and funny commentary during the interview) at 10am to start the day and hang around for a little of the John in the Morning broadcast.
The next event was to try to make it to Central Park to see The Arcade Fire. Their show had long since sold out, but I've had great experiences sitting in the lawn outside the stage area. You can hear everything extremely well, but it's still possible to talk to your friends -- and it's free out there. It is, however, not possible to see what's going on and that turned out to be somewhat critical for this particular show. At one point the band said they were going to do a David Bowie cover (Queen Bitch) and the crowd in the venue went crazy -- which isn't totally unexpected, but it was notably louder. We outside the venue simply thought it was cool, but the inside folks were watching David Bowie actually walk onto the stage to perform with The Arcade Fire (is it still a cover at that point?), so I guess their enthusiasm makes a little more sense now. We didn't even realize until the next day that he was there and performed that song and a couple of more after that.
The real event of the evening though was seeing Dottie's band Of Montreal play the top spot at the Knitting Factory. The Athens/Atlanta connection (of which Of Montreal is a part) continues to amaze me. Of Montreal has a large pile of mp3s if you're interested in checking them out -- which you should be.
Posted by Ben at September 17, 2005 10:17 AM
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