Admittedly I have been a bit silent about the past Drop Dead, no full review, not as many photos as there should have been. Honestly this year was daunting. Between crazy logistics and sound problems, there never the less was magic in the air. Festival officially was 5 days beginning with concerts on the beach under the moonlight but people came early and stayed late so it really was more like a week to two week extravaganza. The bands were amazing, and Portugal was a special place to visit. Simply the whole thing was daunting work to put together and run with a tiny crew but an experience of a lifetime never the less.

There has been copious amounts of videos from the festival on youtube some of questionable quality, some pretty damn good. this will give you some idea of inspiration , madness and silliness that went on last October in Portugal, Drop Dead Festival 6. Kicking things off with a funny segment from a major Portuguese TV station featuring an interview with yours truly and bemused 13th moon.

Please follow me behind the Cut to see UK Decay, Kitchen and the Plastic Spoons, Lene Lovich , Cinema Strange, Phantom Vision, †13th MOON†, and Tchiki Boum playing at the festival.

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9.8 out of 10 New York music fiends and club owners know NYC is total shit for all ages shows. Be it because city officials are consistently waging a war against under 21 venues or because clubs make money from alcohol proceeds and they don’t really fight for the under 21 crowd, NYC 18+ let alone all ages clubs are overwhelmingly a hard gig to find.

But as the old saying goes where there is a will there is a way. There is a thriving DIY all ages scene in New Your City. In the vacuum of proper all ages venues, shows are being booked in everything from music studios, to wear house spaces, even into living rooms. These clubs not being exactly legal it’s a bit tricky to advertise so everything is done mostly through word of mouth, social networks like myspace and free pamphlets and publications like Showpaper.

Last Friday at a benefit for Showpaper at Brooklyn’s Vanishing Point, of course a DIY all ages event, a 6 bands picked up a flag of the original NYC no wavers and raised a banner of New New Sound. The cool thing about the show was the variety of sound, from punk, to tribal world music, to post punk, to 8 bit, to no wave and art punk. Kids at this show stayed for the whole concert, getting into each band, dancing, going generally going crazy being proficient at a serious business of having a good time.

You be the judge bellow: full evidence complete with show videos!

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I miss old punk shows , i miss circle pits at CBGBs, all my friends going crazy to a good band. I need a punk fix, and just in time here comes ONE BIG CROWD.   Saturday December 6, 2008 at Knitting Factory OBC is a tribute to infamous NYC 80’s club A7. with over 30 early hardcore punk bands from east coast. No we are not talking a bastard of metal and punk that hardcore became later. This is real punk, raw, fast and infectious. A rare chance to see many of these early bands , few of which are doing a one off.

MP3: Jerry’s Kids - Desperate
Links:
A7NYHCreunion http://www.myspace.com/a7reunion
Knitting Factory http://ny.knittingfactory.com

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It’s been a little over a month since the finish of the Drop Dead Festival 6.  Looking back now it almost seems impossible that we shared five days of perfect madness and music overdose in Portugal. We came from all over the world and we celebrated like there is no tomorrow. As after the festival blues sets in and I begin to miss the hell out of friends who live way to far for me too visit, here is a bit of a pick me up. Please enjoy a first installment of out Drop Dead Family Album. ! Please send us your photos, videos and experiences from the DDF to dropdeadmagazine at gmail.com!

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13th moon photo  by Pedro Polonio httpclub-silencio.blogspot.com,

Part Time Punks Festival
November 16 2008
http://parttimepunks.com
2pm-2am at The Echo & Echoplex. ALL AGES!

Tickets www.ticketweb.com $20

Have you been starved for the post punk sound? LA’s Part Time Punks has your answer. November 16th, 2008 is the first ever Part Time Punks Festival. The lineup is quite impressive, combining early original post punk bands and up and comers over the 12 hour span and 2 large venues (The Echo & Echoplex). Part Time Punks’ lineup reads like a history lesson of post punk. Innovators of the genre from the Manchester UK Factory Scene are joined by Los Angles Synth punk, Georgia Athens dub punks, and a leading early post punk bands from Boston, and rounded out with dub, funk and psychedelic oriented post punk bands as well as up and coming punk and post punkers from all over .

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Reprint from DDM Issue 2 (Subscribe HERE)

You Don’t Love Me, You Love Magazines

By Seth Styles

Nose up against the wall of severe writer’s block, I mentioned to a friend of mine my desire to write an epic article on the beginning of Californian synth punk but that I had n

o clue where to begin.  Automatically, he retorts that I could begin talking about the fact that the synthesizer as an instrument was a gender juggernaut to the hetero guitar machismo of rock music at the time or that the somewhat affordable and easy to use nature of the instrument placed it precisely in line with the DIY ethos.  Can you tell he’s a grad student?  And here I was going to spout out some story about my father watching Brian Eno with Roxy Music.
But how right my pal was.  The lads and ladies lining up to join the future were often crypto-homo androgynous bursting with equal amounts charisma and inspiration with little time for the hassles of rigorous practice.  Rather than find themselves ensnared by strings, they opted for the instrument that you could stumble into blindly and still make a decent sound.  Woe are we that live in the age in which the EBM grubs sustain on random brushes with pre-programmed synths, but fear not as this tale takes place in a time where ideas reigned over all else.  And as you’re about to find out, these weren’t acne-scarred hacks using samplers to fight God from their parent’s basements.  These were manic artists using a relatively unexplored instrument to kill anything that moved.

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Reprint from DDM Issue 2 (Subscribe HERE)

Album: You Goddam Kids!
Artist: Geza X and the Mommymen
Record Label: Dionysus Record,
2002 (recorded: 1982),

Savor this review, as it’s not often that you’ll read about a project that fuses psychedelia, avant-garde jazz, funk, and punk into a party album.  Geza X may be most recognized for his production work for Black Flag, but he was easily one of the most experimental producers to touch a mixing board, let alone have a conversation with one.  But despite the fact that Mercutio was easily more interesting than Romeo, his import was as a supporting character and such was normally the case with Geza X, whether performing guitar for The Deadbeats and The Bags or mixing singles for just about any worthwhile punk band to come out of California. Fortunately for you, listener, an increasing obsession with a specific family of chords dubbed “X chords” that were considered fatal crimes in bygone times prompted Geza to form his own project.  Perhaps the most taboo aspect of the project involved a heart-on-sleeve distorted valentine to artists like Frank Zappa and Bonzo Dog Band imbedded in each song.

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