[NEXT] Harriet "I Slept With All Your Mothers"

I'll credit my friend Perry for turning me on to Harriet–who I see becoming a bit of a sensation over the next few months.  Their single, entitled I Slept With All Your Mothers, off their current album  is simply an incredible song and lead singer Alex Casnoff's vocals hit all the right notes. Harriet, based in Los Angeles, has recently released their album Tell The Right Story for free on the band's website. Pick up the album here.

Bob Dylan 1961 to 1966

Bob Dylan With Top Hat Pointing In Car, Philadelphia PA 1964 © Daniel Kramer

An exhibition on view at the Cité de la musique in Paris retraces the important moments of Bob Dylan between the years of 1961 to 1966, during which Dylan radically changed his artistic approach and sparked a musical revolution. Created by the Grammy Museum of Los Angeles, Bob Dylan, Rock Explosion presents, through previously unpublished photos, objects, rare documents and audiovisual archives, the astonishing story of a personal evolution that marked a societal earthquake. On view until July 15 at the Cité de la Musique. 

18 Years

Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain

It will be exactly 18 years in April since Kurt Cobain took his own life in the green house of his Seattle home in 1994. Last month he would have turned 45. Marking the occasion, two founding members of Cobain's mostly semi-lucid widow Courtney Love's band Hole will be releasing a book and a film surrounding the relationship with Kurt, the band, and the life style of drugs, and the consequences of rapid fame. Firstly, Eric Erlandson, guitarist for Hole, will will releasing a book, entitled Letters to Kurt, which is a collection of poems and free association reflecting on his suicide and its emotional ramifications. Secondly, Patty Schemel, who helped develop Hole's sound and who lived with Kurt and Courtney during some of the more tumultuous times, is releasing a film about her life. Hit So Hard: The Life & Near Death of Patty Schemel is the "portrait of the hell-and-back life of Patty Schemel" and tells the story of her terrible addiction to drugs and how it nearly destroyed her career and life. Schemel is "a true survivor of what we now know was the disaffected 'slacker' generation, Patty found herself, like her friend Kurt Cobain, embraced by the dark side. An unprecedented and unflinching inside look at one of the 90s most crucial and controversial groups." Eric Erlandson's Letters to Kurt will be released April 8th on Akashic Books. Hit So Hard will be premiering this year - first at Cinema Village in New York on April 13, with more dates to follow.

No Death Can Tear Us Apart, Introducing Mirel Wagner

Maybe its her haunting refrains - no death can tear us apart – or maybe its her spiritually profound lyrics, but I'm almost certain her music can only come from a soul that has traveled a myriad universes, and loved and lost a myriad times, only to resurface, like a wave from an opposite and infinite shore, through the voice of Mirel Wagner. Wagner, who was born in Ethiopia and grew up in Espoo, Finland, has certainly been to the crossroads. At 7, Wagner, who's record label biography alludes to the fact that her family name goes back the famous composer, was given violin lessons, and at 16 she was already writing songs and shyly performing them at open mics nights in Helsinki. She was subsequently discovered by Jean Ramsay, an American music journalist living in Finland who was impressed by her talent, and the next thing she knew she was recording an album. The recordings, financed by photographer and friend of Ramsay, Aki Roukala, were completed over two days, 12 songs straight – 9 of which can be found on her upcoming debut album which was recently released in Europe on  Bone Voyage Recordings, and will see its American release this March 27 on Friendly Fire Records. One of those tracks, No Death, is a tragic murder ballad in the same vein as Leadbelly's In The Pines or Townes Van Zandt's Waitin' Around to Die. It is a song about love and tragedy, but tragedy with a brilliant and dark solution. Only when you listen closer do you realize that it is a song about necromancy and never has fucking the dead seemed so romantic: well its gonna get colder/ but my love will ignite/ what was left to smoulder/ I move my hips/ in her I am home/ I’ll keep on loving/ till the marrow dries from her bones. But maybe its the dead that will love us the most – without controversy and without conditions – no death can tear us apart. 

John Cage Turns 100

Art by Daniel B. Sierra

American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist John Cage, who died in 1992, would have been 100 this year and there are a slew of events to celebrate the centenary – including EVERYDAYJOHNCAGE in the city of Rimini, Italy where every single day of 2012 from January 1st to December 31st a viral system distributes publicly and privately, fragments and materials related to John Cage, and  an exhibition entitled Things Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage, a visual art exhibition at Tempus Projects, organized by Independent Curator Jade Dellinger. Inspired by a line from a letter the curator (as a student – in the late 1980’s) received from the late, great composer concerning the work of Marcel Duchamp, Cage noted: “I am not interested in the names of movements but rather in seeing and making things not seen before.” Visit www.johncage.org to see all events.

Exemplar: Photographs of Joy Division

The world was intolerable and mean to Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, and he spit back with cruel, introspectively haunting lyrics in the hopes to close and heal the wounds that he so desperately tried and failed to lick clean.   In the end, love indeed tore him apart. On view now at the Manchester Photographic Gallery are 45 iconic images of life behind the legendary band Joy Division by photographer Kevin Cummings from their first gig in 1977 to Ian Curtis' suicide in 1980. Exemplar: Joy Division by Kevin Cummins, Manchester Photographic  6 January - 26 February, Manchester Photographic Gallery is at Tariff Street, Northern Quarter, City, 0161 236 2446.

Lescop Dans la Forêt

Mathieu Lescop, known simply as Lescop, is making waves on the French pop scene.  John & Jehn, French lo-fi cult music duo based in London, released Lescop's first EP on vinyl back in November off their label Pop Noire and last Friday Kitsuné released his insanely catchy track La Foret on their Parisien II compilation. Lescop has stated that he writes his lyrics strictly in French in an attempt to reinvent French Pop music. La Foret, a song with lyrics that hover in the same air as the dark romanticism of Rimbaudian symbolism, is a perfect example: "I feel your breath brushes my neck / a loaded pistol strokes my cheek." Lescop will be playing at the Shacklewell Arms in London for the Pop Noire Party on January 24.