Results tagged “johnrichards”

Since Capitol Hill denizens stepped up to the plate and donated the most during the 2008 summer membership drive, KEXP is spending Friday hanging out in the neighborhood. John Richards, Cheryl Waters, and Kevin Cole will all broadcast their shows from Caffe Vita--with live performances aplenty, including The Moondoggies, Say Hi, Mates of State, and Black Kids--while other djs will be taking over the sound systems at Linda's, Grey Gallery, the Cha Cha, Havana, Moe Bar, and the Wild Rose. Plus, there's extra discounts and perks for KEXP members at Capitol Hill establishments. Full details here.

If your answer is yes and you wish you had a soundtrack for how you're feeling, look no further than John Richards' show this morning on KEXP. It's the anniversary of his mother's passing, so he's been playing a lovely music-to-make-you-cry mix all morning. Selected songs include: "Casimir Pulaski Day" by Sufjan Stevens, "When You Leave" by Maps, and "Hallelujah" as sung by Jeff Buckley. Audio for the show can be found here (though, today's show isn't posted yet.)

We love some hiphop with our coffee in the morning, and KEXP's John In The Morning obliged us today with a live set from easy-going, hard-working local stars The Physics! You can stream the set and interview on KEXP's website by clicking here and setting the time to 8:07am.

Chris Walla is best known for being the guitarist in Death Cab for Cutie. Or he's known as a producer for Tegan & Sara and the Decemberists. Or maybe you heard about the little incident he had with Homeland Security confiscating his computer last fall. Now Walla's got another reason for notability: his first solo album, Field Manual, out today on Barsuk Records. Singer-songwriter stuff ain't exactly our bag, but Walla's smooth delivery ensures that even the more overtly political songs go down easy. Above is the video for first single "Sing Again," which was filmed in Portland and features about 9,000 cameos from Walla's friends/other Northwest artists. Betcha can't name 'em all!

Seattlest feels dirty (not in a good way) after reading the Oxford American's article on indie rock and Seattle.

This is a big weekend due to the Esurance® Capitol Hill Block Party alone. Tickets are not sold out yet; if nothing else, just by 'em at the door. But what to do if you want to avoid the Hill and the confluence of all those hipsters?

John Richards from KEXP was there MCing and of course Secret Machines were what we came to Westlake Center at noon on a Monday to see, but neither of those were the highest-priced talent that Microsoft would throw up on stage for their first Zune launch event yesterday. None other than the wizard king of Redmond Bill Gates himself stood before us to extol the wonders of the Microsoft mp3 player and pantomime a demonstration of its song beaming technology. Who knows, maybe he really sent a song from his Zune magically through the air to John's Zune - Regardless, it would be more visually exciting to stand there and watch Bill's brain grow.

Tuesday 17th

Silversun Pickups is an up-and-coming California four-piece with boy-girl rock vocals. Their 2005 EP, featuring the single "Kissing Families" won them a lot of new fans, including John Richards and the rest of the KEXP crew. Now their full-length is set to be released next Tuesday to much anticipation in the indie rock blogosphere, and rightfully so---it's solid. Seattlest spoke to raspy singer/guitarist Brian Aubert about the differences between the EP and the LP, the comparisions they get to other bands, and their favorite places (and beer) in Seattle. All the girls on the internets think he's dreamy, but as far as we're concerned, Brian's a total Chatty Kathy.

Here a blog, there a blog, everywhere a music blog. KEXP finally throws its keyboard in the ring after spending the past two years with the most potentially awesome music blog in existence hanging out in their back pocket. Well, it's finally on the table at http://blog.kexp.org. They've got informed DJs with just the right amount of approachability and candor, and we have no idea why they've waited so long to chain them to a keyboard. To be fair, KEXP kinda skipped the whole blog thing and went straight to podcasts, which they did very well. What finally convinced them that podcasts are a flop and they need to come back and pick up on the relatively old school blog wave? If you're looking for answers in their blog announcements, you're not gonna find em.

Last week, Seattlest visited the KEXP studios, met some of our fave DJ's and spoke with one of the most influential voices in Seattle music.

-Yep, Seattlest will be all about the fine livin' in '06. Minimum wage in Washington is going up 28 cents on January, 1, to $7.63 an hour.

KEXP recently announced that they will be pulling out of the Tacoma area and ceasing to broadcast on the 91.7 KXOT FM band they were using down there. The easy thought on this is similar to the one that appeared when, say, the Bellevue Art Museum announced it was shutting its doors: That is, "Anyone that lives in the area outside of Seattle is lame and doesn't care about art or culture and if they did they would live in Seattle. Furthermore, attempting to bring anyone outside of Seattle art or culture is a lost cause because they just don't care." Seattlest doesn't subscribe to that, of course, but it's out there. Actually, we were intrigued by the whole KEXP South experiment from the start, although we wouldn't quite say we thought that investing that volume of resources in old school radio land was the best idea. We don't pretend to know enough about the inner workings of KEXP to deliver any actual facts here, but it seems apparent that a battle has been waged on the inside of KEXP pitting geographic, FM expansion vs the internets and the internets have come out on top. The Tacoma invasion has been repelled and that AP "Little Radio Station That Could" piece has been reprinted in seemingly every paper in the country.

Our mysteriously long commute this morning (the rain? aurora borealis centralized on 99?), in concert with an even more mysterious mp3 player outage (battery power? the gods telling us we need an iPod? technical ineptitude?) forced us to catch Harvey Danger on KEXP. KEXP is broadcasting out of the Museum of Television and Radio in NYC currently, which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Harvey Danger (we think it was Sean?) was on with host John Richards and saying a lot of incredibly cool things. Plus they played a few tracks from their new Little by Little CD and they were incredibly decent, particularly Wine Women and Song.