I'm not saying I should be writing for Pitchfork because I knew what they were going to write a week before they did, but I'm definitely hinting at it. Anyway, it was for a class assignment and it didn't get posted anywhere because I didn't have anywhere to post it. But now, because it's 2010 and bloggers are the new hackers I decided to get a place to post these things, so here it is along with free mp3's after the jump.
A piano greets visitors as they enter the apartment of Nick Ingvoldstad and Tommy Davidson located in the Foxridge housing complex, about 2 miles from the Virginia Tech campus. To the left of the piano, a keyboard synthesizer leans against the wall. An acoustic guitar teeters on the edge of a nearby couch. A small drum kit sits in the corner almost hidden behind hundreds of vinyl records. At almost any time, someone in the apartment has his hands on an instrument.
This time it’s Ingvoldstad, sitting at the piano in a t-shirt and jeans. He says hello without getting up.
“Grab something and play along,” he says over his soft piano melody. “The piano’s easy, I’m just sort of hitting the white keys.”
Ingvoldstad and Davidson are young musicians and part of a growing music scene in Blacksburg, Virginia, the site of the first annual Fever to Sing Festival, which came to a close on Sunday.
The festival included 70 acts, from college rock and indie pop to electronic and dubstep. Most of these bands were local, with about a third having traveled to Blacksburg for the event. “I think the farthest was from Atlanta,” says Davidson, who was part of a small group of students that organized and promoted the Fever to Sing.
The festival was organized by the Fever to Sing Arts Collective, a not-for-profit organization run by Virginia Tech students focused on showcasing the diversity of art from the student community and from the Blacksburg area. According to its website, the collective became an officially recognized Virginia Tech student organization in 2007. The goal of the collective is to help new and established local artists get to know each other and collaborate on projects.
Two such artists are Ingvoldstad and Davidson, also known as Ishkabum and Dream Cop, respectively. They are friends, roommates and budding musicians who performed numerous times in the Fever To Sing Festival over the weekend.
Each has been making music since his youth. Davidson began playing clarinet in middle school band class. Throughout high school he taught himself how to play the guitar and piano.
“My older brother was taking guitar lessons, so I would always mess around with his guitar,” Davidson says, his brown hair falling into his eyes. “We had a piano in our house and my other brother had a drum set.”
“I guess I never really had my own guitar,” he says, laughing. “I would always just borrow family instruments.”
Now, as Dream Cop, which is a project he started a year ago, Davidson uses his laptop and an audio production program to record and manipulate sounds from his keyboard and guitar, crafting an interesting brand of electro pop.
He combines the recorded parts with audio samples—snippets of songs, sound effects, etc.—to create his finished tracks. At this point he has four finished tracks and a handful of incomplete tunes.
One of his finalized tracks is titled, “Beach City/ Carol I Know” and uses vocal samples from two tracks by the Beach Boys: “That’s Not Me” and “Caroline No”. He layers a sample from the original vocal track and repeats it with various effects so that Brian Wilson’s voice becomes the centerpiece of the song. It is accompanied by guitar strums, drum beats, and sound effects that Davidson recorded and added separately.
“I was really obsessed with Pet Sounds for like a three week period when I was making that song,” says Davidson, referring to the Beach Boys’ iconic album. “I just wanted to make it look like the guitar was inside the mix. I tried to just kind of reshape the song. Give it that hazy feel and make it sound darker, too.”
At this point, he’s focused on taking the various loops he has recorded and turning them into finished pieces, while at the same time, getting his music out to a wider audience.
A large part of getting that exposure is tied to live performances, like the two Dream Cop shows that took place during Fever To Sing. “The first live performance that I actually concentrated on and was actually sculpting, was for this festival.”
The music blog, Pretty Much Amazing, which has been written up in the New Yorker and the New York Post, featured Dream Cop’s song “Basement Tapes” in December and Davidson expects to have another song, “Marooned” on a blog called Transparent. All of his songs are available on Dream Cop’s Myspace page.
“I was really excited to hear that because Pitchfork gets a lot of its [new artists] from Transparent,” he says. Pitchfork is a popular music site and major outlet for independent artists.
“He told me he liked the track and that he’d write a post about it tomorrow,” Davidson continued with a chuckle. “He said that like three weeks ago.”
In mentioning Pitchfork, Davidson hints at larger aspirations for Dream Cop. Being featured on Pitchfork is a breakthrough for indie musicians.
Pitchfork has already written twice about a fellow Blacksburg artist. The project’s name is Wild Nothing and it features Blacksburg local Jack Tatum. Wild Nothing was not featured in the festival, but delivered their shoegaze-inspired indie pop to an enthusiastic crowd at a house show on Saturday. Tatum and his band, formerly called Facepaint, are already well known within the Blacksburg music scene and with a full-length album on the label Captured Tracks, and buzz building on sites like Pitchfork, he could be recognized in larger circles very soon.
“He’s been on [Transparent],” Davidson says of Tatum. “I was excited that we actually had music in Blacksburg that was getting exposure like that.”
It appears as though he’s on the path towards getting similar exposure.
Just down the hall from Davidson, Ingvoldstad sits at his desk between two large speakers, with Arthur Russell playing loudly. It seems Ingvoldstad is never without music filling his ears.
Ingvoldstad got started in music playing violin in elementary school. He took piano lessons throughout middle school before teaching himself to play guitar.
The first thing he recorded was the sound of his parents fighting on a microphone he purchased to play computer games when he was 15 years old. He then began recording various sounds and guitar riffs on Sony Acid, a program he continues to use along with Reason another digital music program.
He now creates dubstep music under the name Ishkabum, and is also in a rock band with friends from Blacksburg called Grapes. He was busy during Fever to Sing, playing two shows as Ishkabum and two shows with Grapes. He says his focus is on his solo work.
As Ishkabum, Ingvoldstad has already digitally released three full-lengths and two EP’s with another album set to be released in May 2010. His albums are all available for digital download via the net label extlabs.
Ingvoldstad understands the importance of self-promotion. “I try to get onto every network I can think of: Twitter, Myspace, Last.fm, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Youtube,” he says. “I post my stuff on all different kinds of forums. I basically just try to be everywhere.”
Beyond that, he continues to put out quality music. “If people follow and are interested then that’s great, but if not then I’m just doing it to put it out there.”
Having been making digital music since high school, Ingvoldstad taught Davidson some of the basics about using various programs to create music.
“Yeah, I actually gave him [Sony Acid],” says Involdstad. Davidson credits his roommate with helping him learn some techniques for recording his own material.
According to Ingvoldstad, the two keep up with each other’s work, often providing feedback as a song is being worked on. “We always play each other our stuff and comment on it,” he says. “We keep track of each other’s style and progression.”
They differ in their musical style, with Ishkabum sounding louder and more bass-heavy in the dubstep or glitch genre while Dream Cop makes a more subdued electronic pop.
Nonetheless, the two have recorded some music together. “He was on Daylight Savings Time,” Ingvoldstad says, referring to his self-released 2009 album. “He played a guitar line. On this other song that I think I will release on [upcoming album] Clear Theta Clear, I had just started with a synth line and asked Tommy to write a bass line for it. He came up with that and I wrote the rest of the song around it.”
The two also simply jam on the various instruments scattered throughout the apartment, often with friends from other bands joining in.
Between those instruments, the vinyl record framing the peephole on the front door, the posters lining the walls, the massive collection of records and CD’s, and the impressive stereo set-up, there’s no mistake: This apartment belongs to musicians.
Even spending only a short time there, it becomes clear that both of them have a remarkable passion for music. Ingvoldstad takes great care when choosing a record to play next. Davidson can wow you with references to everything from brand-new obscurities to 80’s classics. The two can sit and critique a piece of music for hours, connecting it to similar songs, reciting artist names, album titles and release dates on a particularly impressive variety of music.
The Fever to Sing Festival brought a small-but-growing Blacksburg music scene together for a weekend. It’s up-and-comers like Dream Cop and Ishkabum that will help the scene mature.
And here's the Dream Cop track that I mentioned, plus a pretty sweet Dead Prez remix from Ishkabum and a song from Wild Nothing.
Dream Cop - Beach City/Carol I Know
Ishkabum - Grip Grop [Dead Prez Crunkstep Mix]
Wild Nothing - Confirmation
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