Kamala Harris’s running mate is a rock fan with an affinity for Minnesota artists including Bob Dylan, Prince, the Replacements and Hüsker Dü.When Beto O’Rourke and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota served in Congress together in the 2010s, they would go on early morning jogs and talk about their shared love of music from Minnesota, from icons like Bob Dylan and Prince to the indie rock ferment the Twin Cities produced in the 1980s, including the Replacements and Hüsker Dü.“Music would come up a lot,” Mr. O’Rourke recalled of those runs when they were both serving on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. (He also said that Mr. Walz, a native Nebraskan, seemed impervious to Washington winters, wearing T-shirts and shorts.)Mr. Walz’s affinity for rock comes up often enough, vouched for by enough sources, to appear deep-seated. By all appearances, the governor, whom Vice President Kamala Harris selected on Tuesday as her running mate, truly loves his dad rock.Three years ago Mr. Walz wished Bob Dylan — born in Duluth, raised in Hibbing — a happy 80th birthday on social media, identifying “Forever Young” as a favorite Dylan tune (Walz posted the slow version, not the up-tempo one). Last year Mr. Walz used purple ink to sign a law honoring the Minneapolis native Prince, the artist behind the 1984 album and movie “Purple Rain,” by renaming a stretch of Highway 5 the “Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway.”Mr. Walz periodically texts about upcoming rock concerts in the Twin Cities or Mr. O’Rourke’s hometown, El Paso. “I love that he has got one of the most intense jobs in the world, all these things on his plate, but he finds time to reach out, to listen to music, to go to concerts,” Mr. O’Rourke, a onetime presidential hopeful, said in an interview.Mr. Walz, 60, is also a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Patrick Murphy, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who at one point was Mr. Walz’s roommate in Washington, recalled how Mr. Walz urged him to delve deeper into the Springsteen catalog.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The musician and audio engineer, who died on Tuesday at 61, gave artists including Nirvana and PJ Harvey an authentic representation of their work at a reasonable price.The Chicago noise wrangler Steve Albini’s signature recording technique was the invisible force that brought alternative rock’s most recognizable sounds to life. Preferring the term “recording engineer” to “producer,” he championed a style of elevated realism that remains as influential as the tracks he captured — most famously drum-heavy albums by Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey and the Jesus Lizard.Those sessions would define his career, but Albini, who died on Tuesday at 61, was loathe to say he had a “sound.” Bands of all D.I.Y. genres — from the famous to the unknown — converged on his Electrical Audio studio seeking what he really provided: an organic, authentic and honest representation of their work at a reasonable price.Albini estimated he’d recorded “a couple thousand” albums in a 2018 interview; his productivity was related to the purity of his process. Albini sessions were done quickly and affordably. Instruments were recorded with room microphones to capture the natural reverberations of the space. Analog gear and one-take recordings were preferred. “Anyone who has made records for more than a very short period will recognize that trying to manipulate a sound after it has been recorded is never as effective as when it’s recorded correctly in the first place,” he told Sound on Sound magazine.Here are 10 songs that demonstrate his philosophy of the studio. (Listen on Apple Music or Spotify.)Pixies, ‘Where Is My Mind’ (1988)For the first record he recorded outside of his friend circle, Albini used the buzzy Boston band Pixies as lab animals for his sonic ideas: loading its debut album, “Surfer Rosa,” with off-the-cuff studio chatter, refusing to use silence in between songs and making the bassist Kim Deal sing the reverb-soaked background vocals on “Where Is My Mind?” in the studio’s echo-y bathroom. In retrospect, Albini said his production touches were intrusive, but the next generation of alt-rock titans found them invigorating. “‘Where Is My Mind?’” later became one of the records that other bands would reference when they wanted to work with me,” he told The Guardian. “Nobody expected it to take off because no underground American band of that generation had even a fleeting notion of commercial success as a goal. People just wanted to blow minds.”The Breeders, ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ (1990)When Albini worked with Deal on her solo project the Breeders, “I instantly preferred it to the Pixies,” he said in the book “Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies.” “There was a simultaneous charm to Kim’s presentation to her music that’s both childlike and giddy and also completely mature and kind of dirty.” The band, often in pajamas, banged out its debut LP, “Pod,” in the first week of a two-week session. “Steve Albini wasn’t interested in ‘perfecting’ a song or a performance: His métier was getting the best sound from the equipment and pressing ‘record,’” the Breeders bassist Josephine Wiggs said in a 2008 news release. “He was utterly pleased with himself when mixing the record, saying, ‘Look — no EQ!’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

To pull together a 85-minute indoor concert at the Shed with the opera star and three musicians, everything had to go according to plan.The soprano Renée Fleming sauntered onstage in a shimmering long-sleeve gown, perched on a chair and started to sing.For a renowned performer decades into her career, it might have been an uneventful Wednesday evening at the Shed, the expansive performance space in Hudson Yards. But after 13 months in a pandemic, a sea of faces was a novel sight for the opera star and the trio accompanying her.“Wow, applause!” she remarked after finishing the meditative opening number. “Very exciting.”Exciting, indeed — and no mean feat to pull off.After the Shed and other flexible New York performance spaces lobbied to let audiences in, it got the go-ahead to open its doors for a live event on April 2, after 386 days of shutdown. Fleming’s April 21 show there, before a limited audience, was the fourth performance in a series co-sponsored by NY PopsUp, a public-private program aimed at reviving the arts.While the 85-minute show — a mix of classical, jazz and popular music — went off without a hitch, it demonstrated that mounting indoor events in New York at this stage of the pandemic will still be time-consuming, unpredictable and expensive.To get Fleming and the musicians onstage involved dozens of hours of careful planning; hundreds of dollars in safety equipment like plastic face shields and hand sanitizer; and nearly $2,500 in coronavirus tests. All this for drastically reduced ticket revenue.And while she may have been the headliner, pulling the show off took a large cast of behind-the-scenes figures, some of whom hadn’t worked regularly in the building for months.Monday: Two days to showtimeIn normal times, the staff in a preshow morning production meeting might be discussing last-minute program changes or the status of ticket sales.On April 19, it was where and when Renée Fleming would get her rapid Covid tests.She would arrive to rehearse at 1:30 p.m. the next day, the staff was told, and head to the sixth floor to the smaller Kenneth C. Griffin Theater, where her dressing room was located. There, she would meet a medical technician who would administer a nasal swab.There would be no servers bringing the talent tea, coffee or food, per health department edict.“We do the barest minimum,” said Laura Aswad, the Shed’s producer, noting that Fleming, who had acted in a play during the Shed’s opening season, wouldn’t be left completely untended: Bottled water, tea bags and a kettle would be in her dressing room.Alex Poots, the Shed’s chief executive, had one big announcement to share with the staff. The venue had not received state permission to expand the size of the audience. In the days leading up to the concert, the Shed had asked to double capacity from 150 to 300, which would still only be a fraction of the roughly 1,200 people the McCourt, its largest performance space, can seat.But the state had essentially told them: Not so fast.The concert had sold out in two hours. Audience members who did secure tickets had already received the first of four emails explaining the coronavirus protocols they would need to follow.Gone was the chance to rush to a concert after work and plop down into your seat as the curtain rose. Before they entered the Shed, concertgoers would need to check one of three boxes: show proof of full vaccination; demonstrate a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of the event; or have taken a rapid antigen test, which is less reliable, within six hours of showtime.This was such a jumble of rules and dates that the front-of-house staff would be provided printed cheat sheets for the day of the show.Shed employees check vaccination certificates from audience members before admitting them to the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTuesday: One day to showtimeThe guitarist Bill Frisell was surrounded by piles of sheet music — some Handel, some Stephen Foster — laid out on the dining room table and the living room floor of his Brooklyn home. He was writing out his parts in pencil, referencing a list of songs that Fleming had sent to him, the bassist Christian McBride, and the pianist Dan Tepfer.Pandemic restrictions meant only one in-person rehearsal before the day of the show, and Frisell was in study mode. He had played alongside Fleming before — they had recorded an album in 2005 — but never alongside Tepfer or McBride.“It adds a level of stress to the event, no question,” Fleming said. “We still have a lot to figure out in terms of how we’re arranging everything.”As Frisell was reviewing the sheet music to Cole Porter’s “Down in the Depths (on the Ninetieth Floor),” Fleming was up on East 57th Street, visiting her longtime hair stylist, Michael Stinchcomb, at Vartali Salon.Stinchcomb has been an avid fan since the 1990s and first met Fleming backstage at Carnegie Hall. He’s been doing her hair for more than two decades, often traveling around the world when she performs.But last winter Fleming moved from New York to Virginia, and the pandemic had prevented her from visiting Stinchcomb until the day before her Shed performance.“She was so happy to come in,” Stinchcomb said. “She’s a woman who likes to look good.”Later that afternoon, Fleming arrived at the Shed for a three-hour rehearsal, where she and the musicians discussed harmonies, tempos and spots for improvised solos.“A full rehearsal the day before a show?” McBride said. “That’s a lot in the jazz world.”José Rivera, left, and Steven Quinones place clusters of seats more than 6 feet apart.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWednesday: 11 hours to showtimeJosé Rivera pointed at the space between two clusters of seats. “From here to here, it’s 6-foot 4,” he announced, bending to scrutinize his yellow tape measure. “From here to here is 6-foot 1.”That made the grade: According to state rules, the distance between audience members had to be over six feet.He and another facilities employee, Steven Quinones, had been arranging the chairs for some two hours, ensuring that the setup matched a detailed paper diagram.“And see, this is the big aisle that people walk through, so it’s 9 feet, 5 inches,” Rivera continued, raising his voice to be heard over the whirring of a third colleague zooming around the room on an industrial floor scrubber.Five floors up, Josh Phagoo, an operations engineer, checked up on one of the Shed’s most important technologies for Covid safety: the HVAC system. Massive air handlers and chillers in the building’s engine room whirred constantly as Phagoo made sure the machines that keep the air at roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity at 50 percent were functional.On the stage itself, the first piano notes of the day were vibrating through the air, up to the McCourt’s 115-foot ceiling.Stephen Eriksson had arrived at 11 a.m. to tune the gleaming Steinway grand piano. While he said his business had disappeared for the first four months of the pandemic, now he is busier than ever.For nearly 30 minutes, he used a tuning wrench to make sure that the piano was concert ready. Afterward, he played a bit of Debussy and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”“That’s a bit of pure indulgence,” he said.Stephen Eriksson tuning the grand piano on the day of the performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWednesday: Three hours to showtimeWithin 15 minutes after arriving at the Shed, Fleming — who was scheduled for her second vaccine in New York the morning after the show — got the rapid Covid test in her dressing room. Negative.Afterward, she rehearsed onstage with the musicians, their instruments positioned more than six feet apart from one another, while an audio crew member in a mask and a face shield flitted around them, making sure everything was working properly.The six-person crew working the show was slightly smaller than usual, according to Pope Jackson, the Shed’s production manager. Everywhere they went, they brought along what Jackson referred to as a “Covid cart,” which contained a stock of masks, gloves, sanitation supplies and brown paper bags, which the musicians’ union requires so that players have a clean place to put their masks while they perform.Downstairs, a staff of eight security guards had their nostrils swabbed to make sure that they tested negative.Richard Reid, who works security, getting a rapid Covid test before the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFleming and the musicians had been doing virtual and outdoor concerts throughout the pandemic, but the security staff was filled with people whose careers had been even more upended.Allen Pestana, 21, has been unemployed for more than a year after being let go from working security at Yankee Stadium; Duwanna Alford, 53, saw her hours cut at a church in Morningside Heights; Richard Reid, 33, had worked in April 2020 as a security guard at a field hospital in Manhattan, where he had tried to forget his health fears and focus on the hazard pay he was receiving.This was the moment before a concert where the theater was alive with preparation and nerves — a bustle missing in the city during the first year of the pandemic.“It’s like doing the electric slide, the moonwalk and the bachata all at once,” Jackson said of the minutes before showtime. “But when the lights go up, it all fades away.”The masked audience applauding at the end of the 85-minute concert.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShowtimeThe front-of-house staff had only 20 minutes to review the audience members’ IDs and Covid-related documents; take their temperatures; and show them to their seats.Icy gusts of wind just outside the doors weren’t making things any easier.But by 8:05 p.m., 150 people had settled into their precisely placed seats, able to snap a photo of the QR code on the arms of the chairs to see the concert program.In between performances of the jazz classic “Donna Lee” and “Touch the Hand of Love,” which Fleming had once recorded with Yo-Yo Ma, the artists chatted onstage about what they’d been doing with their lives for the past 13 months.“Wishing this pandemic would be over,” McBride said.Tepfer said he had been improving a technological tool that made it easier for musicians to play in unison over the internet — a tool that he and Fleming had used to rehearse together virtually.Frisell had not performed for an indoor audience since the beginning of the pandemic. “This is such a blessing,” he said.The show ended with a standing ovation, and then the musicians played an encore: “Hard Times” by Stephen Foster, which Fleming described as a song that tends to resonate in times of crisis.“Hard times,” she sang, “come again no more.” More

Pop in the 21st century has largely been a woman’s game, but Boone has flipped his way into the upper echelon by satisfying at least four different internet niches.If you asked a social media executive to design a pop star with maximum virality in mind, they might show you someone like Benson Boone.The 23-year-old Utah native satisfies at least four different internet niches: He is a belter, and has mastered the pained expression of singers dramatically straining for the high notes. He flips — you already know this, of course — often enough that he has his own acrobatic video compilations. He is patriotic in a vague, pseudo-apolitical way; his second album, released last week, is called “American Heart,” and its cover features Boone holding an American flag while covered in soot and grime, as if recently returned from the battlefield. And he is a sexual showboat, donning revealing outfits and grabbing his crotch onstage; he also possesses what British GQ described last year as a “sexy little dirtbag mustache,” the facial hair du jour for Gen Z celebrities.But Boone is also something rare in 2025: a successful white male pop star. Pop music has been a woman’s game for much of the 21st century, but the disparity has been even more stark during the 2020s. The male stars on the charts right now who aren’t named Bruno Mars either come from the worlds of country (Morgan Wallen, Shaboozey) or rap (Drake, Kendrick Lamar) or both (Post Malone). Aside from Harry Styles, who hasn’t released new music in over three years, very few male stars — artists who can sell out arenas or stadiums like their female counterparts — are playing in the pure pop space. (The TikTok prankster-turned-Christian rocker Alex Warren, whose execrable wedding song “Ordinary” tops the Hot 100 right now, feels like the product of every media ecosystem other than the pop industry.)Boone’s debut album mostly contained sweet, simple songs about late adolescence, but his latest, “American Heart,” is slightly more complicated.Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesToying with gender and sexuality has been a big part of Styles’s performance and appeal: He’s both explicitly embraced femininity — wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue, painting his nails — and tapped into hoary rock star tropes with songs like “Kiwi,” about the fear that you’ve gotten a fan pregnant. Boone has done his own version of blurring the lines. While he dates the actress and social media personality Maggie Thurmon and acknowledges that most of his fans are young women, he saves his sweetest, most intense love songs for the men in his life (like his father and his best friend, Eric). And in terms of presentation and stage panache, he explicitly nods to a queer forebear: the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. The two share a penchant for cat suits, mustaches, even an imperious stage presence. But where Mercury covertly gestured at gay subculture, Boone seems to imagine an alternate history.Boone was born in a small town in Washington and raised Mormon. A competitive diver from a young age, he only began singing in his late teens, then started posting videos of himself on TikTok. He had grown up a voracious fan of acts like One Direction and Justin Bieber — he and his pal Eric, he has said, would watch their videos for hours. At 18, he auditioned for “American Idol” and wowed a panel of judges including Katy Perry, who predicted the world would “swoon over Benson Boone.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

WENN

The upcoming Electric Blockaloo livestream festival is scheduled to take place inside the video game Minecraft with hundreds of artists on the line-up.
Jun 14, 2020
AceShowbiz – Steve Aoki, Rudimental, and Paris Hilton are among the new stars added to the already bursting line-up for the Electric Blockaloo livestream festival.
The upcoming event was already billed as “the biggest digital music festival in history,” thanks to its planned performances from 850 artists, but now a host of new names have been added to the roster.
As well as Steve, Paris and Rudimental, Bob Moses, Maya Jane Coles, Skream, Blondish, Seth Troxler, Khruangbin, MK, DJ Soda, Ekali, Felix da Housecat, Ivy Lab, Kevin Saunderson, The Knocks, Krafty Kuts, Luciano, Carl Craig, DJ Sneak, Sherelle, and Todd Terry will also be entertaining viewers with virtual performances.
The Electric Blockaloo festival takes place from June 25 to 28, 2020, inside the video game Minecraft. Each artist will perform on a digitally-rendered stage, while attendees will also be given the opportunity to “camp” at the festival – by creating their own dream campsite within the game.
Ticketholders will also be encouraged to donate to charities including Black Lives Matter and The Bail Project during the festival, while Electic Blockaloo will donate five per cent of its profits to those organisations and environmental movement ByeByePlastic.
For more information, or to purchase tickets for the event, visit https://electricblockaloo.com/.

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