All photos by Rachel Barrish | RaddRhapsodies.com

It was billed as a hyper-rager, and it certainly did not disappoint – the March edition of Dave P‘s Making Time was a stacked triple-bill, with noisy Montreal synth rockers Doldrums, expressive R&B crooner Autre Ne Veut and Spanish dance-rock outfit Delorean.

After Doldrums’ colorful set involving puffy knit headwear and trashcan percussion, Autre Ne Veut took the stage to a tightly packed room. The project of Brooklyn’s Arthur Ashin played Philadelphia this winter on a reportedly sparsely-attended lineup at Johnny Brenda’s – a drag, since his intense style of performing both requires a crowd to vibe off of and deserves a crowd to take in. The teeming crew on the Voyeur main floor seemed like a just recompense, and Ashin strutted the front row, pumped his fist in the air from off the monitor, fell to his knees, made emotive faces and sang acrobatic vocal riffs. The three-piece band worked wonders on tracks from this year’s Anxiety - particularly “Ego Free Sex Free” and “Play by Play” – and while they didn’t venture particularly far from the album arrangements, Ashin’s stage presence elevated the songs to a whole other level.

While Autre Ne Veut confirmed the live reputation I’d been hearing so much about, Barcelona’s Delorean were a total surprise. The band makes sweetly shimmering synthpop, the sort of thing that typically-speaking sounds great coming out of headphones but falls flat in performance. Not these guys, though. Their onstage energy was massive, carrying hints of torch-bearers New Order and Erasure and contemporaries Hot Chip – artists that can make electronic pop work in a band context – and the riled-up crowd totally fed off of it. Points also for slaying the late 80s club nugget “Ride on Time” by Black Box. Check out photos of the night in the gallery above.

Local quartet Divers perform at The Fire tonight.  Comprised of Emily Ana Zeitlyn, Ross Bellenoit, Todd Erk and Thomas Bendel, the young band of seasoned Philly musicians has been steadily packing shows under their belt in recent months.  The three songs posted on Divers’ website offer up some post punk / dark wave sensibilities at certain points and catchy indie pop at other points, with Zeitlyn’s vocal delivery evoking a female Morrissey.  Tickets and information for tonight’s show with Paper Castles, Brad Hinton and Todd Henkin can be found here.  Below, stream “Wild Thing.”

• Wild Thingby DiversDownload

R&B performer Janelle Monae will take part in Penn’s Spring Fling tonight.  The Kansas City native caught the attention of Diddy’s label Bad Boy Records after the independent / self release of The Audition in 2003.  Monae’s breakthrough effort The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III) was released via Bad Boy in 2010 and featured the instant hit and Grammy nominee “Tightrope.”  Monae will be joined by mash-up artist Girl Talk and rapper Tyga at Franklin Field tonight.  Tickets and information can be found here.  Below, watch the video for “Tightrope.”

David Bromberg Quartet performs at the Landis Theater tonight.  Bromberg has been a mainstay of the music scenes in Philadelphia, New York and Wilmington since his days at Columbia University thanks to his skilled guitar playing and humorous lyrics.  Over the  years, the Philadelphia-born multi-instrumentalist has recorded on albums by Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Jorma Kaukonen and more.  Tickets and information for tonight’s show in Vineland, NJ can be found here.  Below, watch the David Bromberg Quartet perform “Fifty Dollar Wig” live at the 2012 Byron Bay Bluesfest.

Netherfriends stops by Church of the Advocate tonight.  Spearheaded by Chicago resident Shawn Rosenblatt, Netherfriends is a melodic indie pop project that embarked on a “50 Songs 50 States” project recently, which will be presented on July 4th as an interactive map.  Last spring, Rosenblatt joined Norwegian Arms and other Philly area bands for a show benefiting Calcutta House, a resource for homeless men and women suffering from AIDS.  Tonight, Netherfriends will be joined by DC’s Drunken Sufis and local bands Rasputin’s Secret Police and MOSS.  Admission is at the door; more information can be found on the Facebook event page here.  Below, watch Rosenblatt perform “St. Louis, MO” from his recent Middle America LP.

Over at Kung Fu Necktie, Arctic Splash will open for Creem Circus.  The Joey Sweeney-fronted band make soulful rock ‘n’ roll and it’s not hard to mistake Sweeney’s crooning for that of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.  The local outfit stopped by recently for a holiday-themed Key Studio session, during which they shared a few non winterized tracks as well – check out a great live version of “When You Say My Name” below and download the full session here.  Tickets and information for tonight’s 21+ show with Naked Heroes can be found here.

Local rock band Cold Roses headline MilkBoy tonight.   Though they’re from Philly, Cold Roses sound like they’re straight out of a Texas roadhouse with their old-style country rock / blues combo.  The four-piece released their debut EP The Georgia Fugue this month and have been celebrating with a string of hometown dates, including tonight’s with Dressed Like Stolen Cars and The Rivals.  Tickets and information for the 21+ show can be found here.  Stream “Lose That Man” from the EP below.

Brooklyn blog-favorites Parquet Courts will be at Voyeur for tonight’s Making Time Valentime’s Day party.   The indie rockers released their first proper full-length Light Up Gold last summer, an effort that followed up their true debut American Specialties (released exclusively on cassette and passed over by most).  Tonight, Parquet Courts come to town with Inc. for Making Time’s Valentime’s Day show with all the Making Time regulars including DJ Dave P and Sammy Slice and special guest DJ The Crystal Ark.  Tickets and information for the 21+ show can be found here.  Below, watch a live video of Parquet Courts performing “Borrowed Time.”

Benefiting Ladyfest Philadelphia, there’s a rocking cover band show happening tonight at Cha-Cha’Razzi in South Philly.   Featuring tributes to Blondie, The Breeders, B-52s and more, all proceeds will go towards the summer festival that celebrates art, music and culture in Philadelphia.  The event will also launch DIYPHL‘s new photozine highlighting a year in local DIY shows and happenings.  More information can be found here.  Watch a video of Fauxlectrelane covering “To the East” at the Sugar Town 10th Anniversary show below.

Montreal five-piece psych boys Elephant Stone are performing tonight at The Fire. The band’s self-titled sophomore album is slated for a February release; in the meantime, you can download the dreamy single “Heavy Moon” here. Tickets and more information about tonight’s 21+ show can be found here; watch the band record “Love The Sinner” below.

London electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco are playing the Making Time party tonight at Voyeur. The pair’s third album, Unpatterns, is a giant break from their last two records, casting out the poppy dance-filled hits from 2007′s Attack Decay Sustain Release, instead opting for a more ambient vibe. Tickets to tonight’s 21+ performance can be found here. Watch the video for “Cerulean” from Unpatterns below.

Philly rapper Lushlife is opening for Oakland hip-hop trio The Coup tonight at Underground Arts. The Coup, made up of Raymond “Boots” Riley, E-Roc, and DJ Pam the Funkstress, dropped their sixth album, Sorry To Bother You, in October, their first release in six years. The 21+ show starts at 9 PM; find tickets and more information here. Check out the single “The Magic Clap” from Sorry To Bother You below.

Photo by Shawn Brackbill | ShawnBrackbill.com

Philadelphia’s Sun Airway can be a lot of things. Musical and visual stylists. Surrealist dreamers, lovelorn introverts, sonic trailblazers – often all within the same song. Their dazzling sophomore record Soft Fall was released on Dead Oceans on Tuesday, and the band is celebrating its release with a hometown show on Friday for the Making Time $2 Bill at Voyeur. We’re exploring the album this week on Unlocked, The Key’s regular spotlight on new and significant releases by Philadelphia-based artists, and today we have an interview with band leader Jon Barthmus. He and I sat down after Sun Airway played XPN’s Free at Noon concert a few weeks back and dug deep into the band’s creative palette, from collaging five full orchestras to finding the right photographs to accompany its sound.

The Key: So firstly – congrats on Soft Fall! It’s a really bold record, it has a confidence and groove to it that sets it apart from from Nocturne of Exploded Crystal Chandelier. Did you feel more confident making it?

Jon Barthmus: I definitely did. The first record was done with like no money whatsoever —really cheap microphones and very little gear, and I was learning those programs that I was using as I was going along. There was such fundamental things that I just didn’t know, like really simple things to do in programs that when I learned them I was like “Oh my God, how did I not know this? How did I make a whole record without knowing this?”

TK: “There’s this keyboard shortcut that could have just saved me hours…”

JB: Yeah, or even stuff like, “I guess you can’t do this, I guess I can’t crossfade anything.”But of course you can, and I just didn’t know! And I wasn’t really learning other than just doing stuff and trying to figure it out as I went along. So this time I got to buy better mics and got to take my time with it, actually got to do a couple days in legit studios, and had more people’s hands on it. They know what they’re doing better than I do, so that was definitely really helpful.

TK: When you’re making a Sun Airway record, is the writing / recording process all you, by yourself, and then it’s brought to the band?

JB: That’s basically the gist of it. The live band took a break, when I did the bulk of Soft Fall, and I developed it on my own. I mean for us, since a lot of it’s not really actual instruments on record, it’s a lot of samples that are chopped up and reconfigured, there’s a big process of figuring out how to divide them between five musicians—who should play what? Or if we should just have more ambient stuff in the background going on, on the computer, which we do…

TK: The collaging of samples jumped out at me, the string sections and horn parts. You know how you hear about William S. Burroughs’ cut-up style of writing, where words are excerpted and brought together in different ways? It felt like here, you had done that with classical records and even jazz records.

JB: Yeah. Nocturne was made almost completely like that with chopped up samples, but it was a lot of just weird old synth records…and just chopping a quarter-second, and making every note on the scale out of that quarter second and then putting together my own patch of that sound. A lot of it, I don’t think, even really comes off as sounding like samples; it sounds a lot of the time just like synth-patches but it’s stuff that I’ve kind of lifted from other things. But for this I wanted to stick mostly to this really high-quality classical music. And then that stuff, after kind of chopping it all up and putting it together, I wanted to break it back down into sheet music and then have an actual string section re-record it. So I found someone that kind of helped me transcribe that all—I would send him the parts and he would try to figure out what was going on or how to best approximate that with the string quartet. He did amazingly at that, and then what you hear in the end is kind of a balance of the original samples with the string quartet.

TK: Was it hard to find that balance?

JB: It was weird. I liked it because it surprised me with melodies that I wouldn’t have come up with just kind of falling into place because of how the samples might line up. There were interesting ideas between what the instruments do, some things where there’s one complete orchestra laid on top of another complete orchestra, and this one’s panned all the way to the left, this one’s panned all the way to the right. There’s this weird interplay. And at some points there’s like five complete classical orchestras on top of each other.

TK: That sounds intense.

JB: Yeah.

TK: So your old group, The A-Sides, was more of a five-piece rock band configuration. After that group dissolved, how did you decide to like make the transition to electronic music?

JB: It’s hard to say if The A-Sides would have just turned into that anyway, ‘cause that was definitely what I was most interested in doing. And I was starting kind of simultaneously starting to learn various software programs that did more of that kind of thing, but it also worked out that like everybody quit the band at the same time. So then, Patrick and decided it would be better to just start completely from scratch and make our own records, and not really rely on recording studios. I was just kind of ready for a change. I was tired of playing guitar, which is funny ‘cause now I’m bringing back the guitar, and it feels awesome.

TK: I noticed that with your Free at Noon set. It was my first time seeing you since XPoNential Fest in 2011, which I remember it was a really sunny afternoon and the three of you were in the front of the stage kind of like jamming away at samplers and keyboards…

JB: Yeah, it was really difficult to engage with a crowd or even just to kind of make it visually interesting standing behind the keyboard. We got someone else to join up and do that stuff, take that from me so I could do more kind of active things. Hopefully it’ll be a little better to watch. It’s hard to really get down behind the keyboard doing stuff.

TK: But you also, when you play like solo club gigs, you would have like a visual component—I saw a Johnny Brenda’s show where there was that awesome Klip Collective —is that something you’re going to continue doing?

JB: That was definitely helpful, and we definitely are continuing our relationship with Klip. They’ve developed a whole new show basically for us, for this record. It’s gonna be crazy, I’m really excited. I’ve seen about half of it, and it’s, it’s kind of the opposite of what it was; it’s more using the projector as a light show, so the projectors are on stage projecting out.

TK: Onto the crowd?

JB: Yeah. There’s haze so it kind of—uh, the light stuff picks up in the haze—it’s gonna be something. You can project on surprising things. That’s something that Klip definitely excels at. It would be really awesome to be able to put together like a huge scale show like that with Klip, ‘cause they would definitely totally kill it.

TK: Historically speaking, like you guys have always had an awesome visual sensibility. I love the cover photograph and sleeve images on Soft Fall…

JB: We’re very fortunate to have those. Those took a lot of work.

TK: And Nocturne had kind of its own distinct psychedelic kind of look to it. How do you choose the people you work with visually?

JB: The Nocturne stuff I did mostly myself, at least the design of it; I am a graphic designer also. Soft Fall I knew I wanted to be photographic, just because of the nature of the music, and it felt like that would be a better fit. When we were on tour in Europe, I picked up these art magazines and I saw this big spread of a Japanese art collective called Nam. I just thought it was like the total perfect thing for this record, so I just contacted them out of the blue, and they ended up being like really excited and just worked with me every step of the way on it.

TK: What about their look connected with you so strongly?

JB: The image that’s on the cover of Soft Fall is kind of a, a continuation of a series that they were doing, which is what I saw and what I kind of wanted them to pick up. It was called “Fantasy and Reality,” this series, and that’s like basically the lyrical gist of this record, so all the pieces were just of someone kind of floating and hovering and all this stuff in the room kind of floating around. It was mysterious and surreal—the exact kind of way that the record felt. I mean, Soft Fall , the name of gives the impression of floating and weightlessness, and that’s what they were doing. I didn’t realize when I contacted them how labor intensive it all was It was like a thirty-hour shoot ‘cause they actually hang all those wires—and they tie a leaf to a wire and hang it up, and they do that hundreds of times. And there’s a dozen people all doing this at the same time. Then they set it up and bring in the model and take the picture and that’s it. There’s no crazy computer trickery, which is kind of what I assumed it all was. What you see in the photo actually happened. It’s totally crazy, and they made it a video of them kind of putting it all together that we’ll have available pretty soon. It’s kind of mind-blowing to watch.

TK: You mention the lyrical content being in between a dream and reality. I feel on Nocturne, there was a lot of emotion, a lot of longing, a lot of pain. But if you listen to the record it doesn’t necessarily come off that way, ‘cause it’s so dreamy, there’s this wash of like sound, samples, chiming ambience. This record feels more directly like bringing the emotions in the lyrics to the forefront. Would you say that’s the case?

JB: Probably The vocals are definitely out front a lot more, just in general. And that’s partially because, um, I have a better microphone and I feel a little more confident singing. And maybe the subject matter this time around. Both records are basically developed around a single theme—more or less, there’s like a stray song here or there that’s not—but for this one there’s kind of a very specific vision of this kind of palatial, surrealist, alternate universe where kind of all these things were happening that really didn’t make any sense, but it tied in with real life stuff. But none of it’s really personal , it’s kind of just writing from different perspectives, and trying to kind of push whatever thematic elements.

TK: Right. The “I” in the songs is not necessarily you, but because you use it, it makes the songs relatable in a way.

JB: People definitely do think that this is all autobiographical, which it’s not. I mean, that is weird because then it looks kind of like I’m a hopeless case. A lot of these characters are definitely having struggles. I guess I end up finding like pain and suffering more interesting to write about than just happy love songs all the time.

Soft Fall is the featured album in this edition of Unlocked; hear the spotlighted song “Close” in Monday’s post, read Tuesday’s album review; watch a music video for “Wild Palms” in yesterday’s post and check back tomorrow for a further exploration of the Nam photo collective’s Fantasy and Reality series.

Also Playing: This Will Destroy You + Mountains, Amen Dunes, Power Animal at First Unitarian Church (8 p.m., all ages, $12); Ryan Cabrera + Jennings at Tin Angel (10:30 p.m., all ages, $15); Vintage Kicks + Clone Justice, Bulletproof Tigers at Milkboy Philly (9:30 p.m., 21+, $8–$10)

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11th

Andrew Lipke performs with Exit Clov and Marc Silver at 9:30 p.m. at Milkboy Philly; tickets to the 21+ show are $10–$12.

Also Playing: Umphrey’s McGee + Work Drugs at Electric Factory (8:30 p.m., all ages, $25); The Summer Set + The Cab, He Is We, Days Difference, Paradise Fears at Union Transfer (6:30 p.m., all ages, $15); Man The Fire + Scoop The Freak, The Naked Sun at North Star Bar (9 p.m., 21+, $7–$9)

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12th
Woollen Kits + Pet Milk at The Level Room (9 p.m., 21+, $7); Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe Presents The Rolling Stones “Sticky Fingers” at Union Transfer (8 p.m., all ages, $20)

From NPR Music:

Continuing in the tradition of alternative dance-pop exemplified by The Dandy Warhols in the late ’90s and early ’00s, Pink Skull stakes its claim in effervescent electronic noiseplay. Philadelphia DJ-and-producer duo Julian Grefe and Justin Geller, known for their adventures in mixing and remixing, have expanded into a live band for which “programming” still plays a necessary role. Traipsing gleefully through styles like disco-punk, acid house and psychedelic tropicalia, the group’s recent Psychic Welfare finds Pink Skull showcasing a tight, focused sound.

• Hot Bubblegumby Pink SkullDownload

“Hot Bubblegum” also appears on WXPN’s World Cafe: Next compilation, which we mentioned last week. This month, as part of World Cafe‘s 20th anniversary, David Dye will be highlighting one artist every weekday during his World Cafe: Next segments. All 20 tracks are currently available as a free download, which you can get in exchange for your email address here. You can also listen to Pink Skull’s recent appearance on World Cafe: Next here. The members of Pink Skull will also perform a DJ set alongside Dave P & Sammy Slice, Adam Sparkles, and the Broadzilla DJs at Making Time on Friday, October 21st, at Voyeur; the event will also feature live performances by The Rapture, Still Corners, and Metronomy. Tickets to the 21+ show are $15.