The FADER Issue 64 Free Download

With domestic issues weighing so heavily on every American’s mind these days, it felt appropriate to focus our sixth annual photo issue inward. We started by selecting two cover stories that represent seemingly opposing factions of this country—the values of small town America via Eau Claire, Wisconsin’s Bon Iver and the hard grind of big city life through South Central Los Angeles’ Dam-Funk—and found more common ground between them than most talking heads and politicians would care to know. For the feature photo story, Peter van Agtmael’s plaintive portraits of widespread citizens and Victoria Sambunaris’ landscapes of geological sites along Interstate 80 create a visual dialogue between man and land and will hopefully leave you asking questions rather than giving answers. And because the future prosperity of the US will depend on the dreams of its newest residents as it always has, we focused our fashion story on first generation Americans and new emigres living in New York’s five boroughs. Not to mention our regular selection of Gen F profiles, including Kris Kristofferson, The XX, Neon Indian, Kurt Vile, Kyle Hall and Warpaint, plus interviews with RZA, Janka Nabay, Andrew Weatherall and tons more. So feel free (because it is literally free) to check it all out, and if you make TheFADER.com your homepage you won’t miss our treasure trove of extras and outtakes from above and beyond the issue.

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64

Having lived and worked in New York City just long enough that I barely even notice
anymore when a giant rat swaggers across the subway platform but totally
freak out when a certain goat cheese isn’t in stock at the farmer’s market, I
find myself less and less in tune with the rest of America with every passing
day. This place does that to people, it seems. But I’ve lived in 12 cities and visited
47 states in my life—Oregon, Washington and Alaska, the holdouts—taken
countless road trips across the country and seen just about every historically
significant landmark on the map. This has always been a great source of pride
for me, a unique experience thanks to parents with a wanderlust not seen
since Genghis Khan. It actually worries me that one day I might wake up and
be nothing but another New Yorker.

Six years ago, I took my last cross-country road trip, from Washington, DC,
to Los Angeles, California. I drove down the southern Atlantic coast, turned in
to Atlanta, went down through New Orleans and San Antonio, then back up
through El Paso, Las Cruces, Flagstaff and the desert, before finally reaching
the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, I met a bunch of gas station attendants,
even more bartenders and one disoriented young couple who’d just rolled
their pickup truck off the side of the highway. I had a long conversation with a
voodoo doll in the French Quarter, talked to myself for several hours in White
Sands and stayed in the Michael J. Fox room at the Hotel Monte Vista. I have
pictures of all this if you want to see them. My dog, Mookie Wilson, was with
me, and because he had his head out the passenger window the whole trip,
we ended up talking to people every time we stopped. Of all those people
along those 3,477 miles, not one told us to get out of town. In fact, I felt like we
could have stayed in any of the hundreds of places we drove through for as
long as we wanted.

Hopefully, reading this issue, you’ll feel the same way. Along with Peter
van Agtmael’s and Victoria Sambunaris’ stunningly disparate portraits of
America, our covers feature stories on two disparate Americans: Justin Vernon
bka Bon Iver, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin; and Dam-Funk, from Los Angeles,
California. Each has a bond with his place of birth that both reflects normal
loyalty and transcends it. Dam never really left LA but is trying to bring its vast
diversity together through time-capsule boogie, and Vernon came back to Eau
Claire to prove its worth to the rest of the country with his particular brand of
indecipherable folk rock. Both are heady aspirations, but wildly inspiring. As
someone who’s never really had a hometown but been all over, they make me
think about the places I’ve been and where I am now, whether I want to ride
for this city or try to reconnect with another one. Maybe the only way to find
out is to grab the dog and some beef jerky and head out on the open road.

—PETER MACIA

Video: Austin City Limits Live Stream

In a nice move that’s reminiscent of our live video stream from The FADER Fort in Austin earlier this year, that city’s preeminent music festival, Austin City Limits, is live streaming in really nice quality on Hulu and their own micro-site, which means you can watch it in the comfort of your own home instead of what looks like rain in Texas. For Hulu, just go to the front page and scroll the top feature box until you see it. And for reasons that will become really obvious in a few days, we strongly recommend you tune in for Bon Iver’s set at 6PM New York time, followed by Trail of Dead and The Decemberists. Tomorrow you’ll get Suckers, Dodos, Here We Go Magic, Passion Pit, The B-52s and Dead Weather, among others. Check the full broadcast schedule for today and tomorrow after the jump.

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Video: Volcano Choir, “Island, IS”

The video for new Justin Vernon/Bon Iver project, Volcano Choir’s “Island, IS” looks like it was filmed somewhere in Miami or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and since are both littered with abandoned condos, who can tell the difference between fallen utopias, anyhow? One shot spans late night into an early sunrise, lonely like Vernon’s lyrics that parallel the internal monologues from all-nighters pulled trying to erase personal troubles. The projected light patterns mirror the drum beats and guitar riffs, and coincidentally look a lot like a game of Simon. And those guitars sound like it, too.

Stream: Volcano Choir, Unmap

Honestly, it’s weird that this thread doesn’t say “Stream: Car Talk, Best of the Puzzler” because its NPR that is streaming Bon Iver’s new group Volcano Choir’s Unmap album. We like this new trend of full album streams. “Island, IS,” the album’s first single was so compelling and unlike anything on For Emma, but it was only a track, a test. Maybe the rest of the record would be all sad cabin laments, six acoustic guitars and guy voices. Turns out it isn’t. Not that there aren’t acoustic guitars—there’s plenty—but there’s also backwards stuff, beeping and possibly Auto-Tune. For another of our favorites from Unmap, check out “Still,” a surprisingly enveloping shoegaze moment. And, for the record, we really wanted to make a joke here about Carl Kasell recording Bon Iver’s answering machine message, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

Stream: Volcano Choir Unmap

Contest: Win Tickets to See Bon Iver Perform in a Cemetery at Sunrise

This show is going to be amazing. On September 27th, Bon Iver will be performing at the Hollywood Forever cemetery in Los Angeles at sunrise (also known as right around 6am). Here’s the awesome part: doors are at midnight, leaving you plenty of time to get a good spot, be a little weirded out that you’re in a cemetery at night, get over it and then feel really good about Bon Iver waking the dead and also that you get a free breakfast included in the cost of the ticket. If we were in LA and more selfish, we would be waiting in line already with these tickets, but we’re not, so let us know how bad you want to go in the comments of this post (remember to use your actual email address) and we’ll pick a lucky winner. If you’re concerned about leaving it to chance you can always pre-order tickets here.

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Volcano Choir, “Island, IS” MP3

Volcano Choir: not that different from Bon Iver! No, just kidding, this is pretty out there in comparison to For Emma, Forever Ago. Justin Vernon’s collaboration with Collections of Colonies of Bees follows the same “torn-down-by-the-world-but-I’m-still-optimistic” road that Vernon has made a mega-career out of, but more inclined to branch off into warm electronic side streets. Has dude been listening to a lot of Prefuse 73? Maybe. But maybe he just got tired of people freaking out about how he chopped his own wood in the forest. Now we can all get super into how he programmed his own songs in ProTools! So rustic.



Download: Volcano Choir, “Island, IS” (via P4K)

Hey Senator Russ Feingold We Can Probably Get You A Complimentary FADER Subscription If You’re Into It

Does this mean that Bon Iver is going to start playing galas now?

Freeload: Bon Iver, “Blood Bank”

If you looked at the above picture, not knowing we pulled it from the MySpace of wonder boy Justin Vernon bka Bon Iver, you’d probably never guess it inspired young ladies to type things like “I wonder how many times women ask you to marry them” or “marry me.” But such is the sultry voice of Vernon, capable of unleashing the blushing bride within all of us — even dudes — and the title track to his forthcoming Blood Bank EP is no different. In fact, a garter belt just flew across the office as this played and there are nothing but dudes in here.



Download: Bon Iver, “Blood Bank”

Audio: Bon Iver’s Blood Bank EP

One minute you’re getting a rubdown with a young, mostly unknown, bearded songwriter in Chinatown, the next he’s getting a big fancy write up in a Condé Nast publication. Only in New York. Last March, just after the release of the now critical smash For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon visited a massage parlor with our then intern David Bevan. They talked about the album and Vernon played “Flume.” You can watch it above, re-upped for posterity.

Almost a year later, Sasha Frere-Jones has profiled him in The New Yorker (read it here) and rightfully gushed about that same song and album. And now that Vernon is destined for fame, Bevan can trade on that story in bars all over the world. Congrats to both of them. Meanwhile, Bon Iver’s new Blood Bank EP, out January 20th, is streaming fully on his MySpace for a limited time. We highly recommend you check it out, especially the vocoder epic that is “Woods.”

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