Sans Temps Morts is Nate Dorr’s weekly New York City events guide.

Do people actually know or care about the Plug Awards? I’m honestly not sure, but at the very least the “Indie” awards program typically has some very good bands playing (wasn’t Deerhoof there last year?) and are less completely god-forsaken than the Grammy Awards (although if Deerhoof played the Grammy awards, that would be amazing). In any event, Impose is apparently nominated for Best Zine . I’m honestly not sure what differentiates zines from magazines in this case, but feel free to throw a vote our way if bored or fanatically into STM. It’s in the “Obsessive Media” section.

This week marks a continuing trend in increased jazz-related music coverage here, itself a result of the big avant-garde push of December. What can I say: I was so thoroughly charmed by the eclectic-yet-engaging avant-pop duo People a couple weeks ago, and so bowled over by the improvisational technique of trumpet player Peter Evans that I now find myself endlessly listing shows they’re involved in. And perhaps due to the improvisational nature of at least some of these projects, it seems like they’re all involved in far more ensembles and play far more often than pretty much anyone in the rock world. Man, rock bands are lazy.

Really, my complete lack of knowledge of the jazz world should disqualify me from writing about it, but I’m going to anyway, so expect more descriptions like “plays the trumpet like it’s a strangled cat. The best strangled cat ever!”

First up in that department, another entry in the ICETANK series and, all this week, Issue Project Room’s A Week of Horns. All of these start at 8pm, and these kinds of shows actually get going on time, so don’t roll in an hour late like the world runs on punk time.

Oh, and I’m just seeing this today: there’s a new Todd P venue opening in Bushwick: Market Hotel. Located at 957 Broadway at Myrtle, this promises to be another Silent Barn sort of spot: another apparent-turned-concert space with what looks to be a pretty regular upcoming concert schedule with High Places, No Age and School of Seven Bells just this week. But can it capture the magic of Silent Barn? These trains will get you there to find out: JMZ - Myrtle, L - Jefferson, G - Myrtle-Willoughby.

Wednesday, 06 February :: ICETANK! V: Uncaged Toy Piano Roadshow, wherein the International Contemporary Ensemble’s Phyllis Chen unveils new compositions from a variety of new composers for toy piano and electronics. Many of the pieces will be debuting with this performance, I think. At excellent non-profit art space the Tank, 279 Church Street, Tribecca. 8pm sharp, $5.

A Week of Horns at Issue Project Room: TILT Brass Band’s SIXtet. One of the two trumpet players is Nate Wooley, who works with Peter Evans, and has a style I can only describe is “drone trumpet”. 232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Gowanus. 8pm, $10.

+Cat Power at Terminal 5, 8pm doors, $32.50

Thursday, 07 February :: Mary Halvorson, as half of the avant-pop project People, impressed me a couple weeks ago at Death By Audio by holding her own against Kevin Shea’s frenzied drumming and asserting her own guitar finesse and clear, well-trained voice. Apparently hailing from a jazz background like Shea, Halvorson also plays with an incredibly wide array of other projects, two of which will be performing at Park Slope’s Tea Lounge. First, Halvorson’s own trio, which also includes John Hebert on bass and Ches Smith on drums, then Ches Smith’s These Arches, in which Halvorson and Smith are joined by Tony Malaby on saxophone, and Andrea Parkins on accordion. 837 Union, between 6th and 7th aves.

Minimalist new-wave duo Macaque , whose charming, slightly awkward single “Inappropriately” somehow managed to get itself stuck in my head for most of last week after single exposure at Goodbye Blue Monday, are releasing their debut EP Chinatown. With Andy D to (at least attempt to) rock your face, and Bubblyfish, last seen at Blipfest in December, bringing the 8-bit pop. At the Knitting Factory Tap Bar, 74 Leonard Street, Tribecca. 8pm doors, $10.

A Week of Horns at Issue Project Room: Herb Robertson (trumpet), Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon), and Matt Bauder (saxophone). 232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Gowanus. 8pm, $10.

Friday, 08 February :: FREE (well, pay-what-you-will. Which is almost free, but may be more like $5 if you have scruples. $5 is still real cheap.) Anyway: sugar-coated-electro mad scientist Dan Deacon is playing at the Whitney Museum as part of their Fridays at the Whitney program, which previously hosted a pretty strange combination dance-theatre-music show featuring ICE. Tragically, this week’s show will not be for a live screening of Ultimate Reality, the tour for which is just wrapping up, but Deacon’s usual show should be reason enough to attend. Personally, I really want to see how out-of-hand crowds are willing/able to get at a museum, of all places. Plus, I have inside information indicating that other Wham City members will be there as well, launching a new Wham City Collective box set to be sold there (basically, everyone made something and threw it in a box, which should be some combination of completely random and amazing). Plus, you get to check out that Whitney’s usually excellent galleries, while there. 945 Madison Ave, at 75th st, Upper East Side. 7pm, $pay-what-you-will.

Angel Deradoorian is now better known as the bassist and back-up singer of the currently tremendously momentum-gathering Dirty Projectors, but also records her own muted, melancholic compositions. With White Hinterlands, Inlets, and Juliana Barwick at Cakeshop, 152 Ludlow btwn Rivington and Stanton, Lower East Side. 8pm doors (Deradoorian actually goes on second), $7.

A Week of Horns at Issue Project Room: Nmperign: Bhob Rainey (soprano saxophone) and Greg Kelley (trumpet). Hmmm, these guys also seem highly capable of creating live minimal drones of a richness I’d previously assumed would require a squadron of laptops, so apparently that sort of thing isn’t actually so uncommon, if no less amazing. 232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Gowanus. 8pm, $10.

+Om and Daniel Higgs (of Lungfish) at Luna Lounge, 7:30pm doors, $14.
+Cassettes Won’t Listen at Union Hall, 8pm doors, $10.

Saturday, 09 February :: Whenever I see a new small venue pop up in the listings, I am overcome by a nearly insatiable urge to go find the place and see what it’s all about immediately. And then often fail to get down there for months. The latest of these is UnionDocs Bodega, normally home to an every-Sunday-at-7pm feature documentary series (for instance, the following Sunday, it’ll be hobo culture annal Who Is Bozo Texino, which I’d actually wanted to see) but now opening its doors to music. The first I’ve seen is the impressive double-bill of People, whose weird balance of languid guitar and hyperkinetic drums underlying lovely floating pop songs recently leapt into my favorite things going on in Brooklyn right now, and the (aptly) self-described ghost punk of These Are Powers, whose mix of atonal guitar jabs, power drills, tremendous rhythms and heavy reverb have recently grown on me quite a lot.

New Todd P venue Bushwick’s Market Hotel, a Silent Barn-styled live-in spot at 957 Broadway at Myrtle in Bushwick is having its inaugural show. With Prefuse 73 noise-pop collaborators School of Seven Bells (whose members include parts of On! Air! Radio! and the Secret Machines) and the Social Registry’s Sian Alice Group, Mikey Bones, and Farmacia. This could be history in the making, people. 957 Broadway at Myrtle, Bushwick. 9:30pm, $6.

FREE: Japanther and Shellshag are playing in combined psych-rock quartet is playing an art opening for a Peter Staley solo show at the Arm Letterpress in Williamsburg. I have no idea what that combination would sound like, but it’s intriguing and there’ll also be a “bake sale & $1 Raffle tickets for choice items” (it’s a fund raiser for a show space in DC). 281 North 7th St. at Meeker. 8pm.

A Week of Horns at Issue Project Room: Matana Roberts playing solo, with Marty Ehrlich’s four alto (s) opening. 232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Gowanus. 8pm, $10.

James Tenney-Milton Babbitt: American Iconoclasts, a program of pieces by two 20th-century experimental composers and their students, by the Manhattan Sinfonietta. At the Merkin Concert Hall (129 West 67th St.). $15 / $8 students / free for Columbia students.

+Kaiju Big Battel at Webster Hall, $20.
+Liars and No Age at Warsaw, 261 Driggs Ave, Greenpoint. 8pm doors, $16.50.

Sunday, 10 February :: For all the talent and innovation involved, a remarkable number of people seem to be pretty uninterested jazz (I myself am horrendously inattentive to the genre most of the time). These people could probably not possibly be bored by the either of the following jazz appropriations: the corrosive noise-jazz freakouts of Child Abuse and the startlingly lovely jazz-informed clatter-pop of People, (to say it once again) one of my new favorite Brooklyn discoveries. Chances are that Philly-based avant-classical-jazz ensemble Normal Love, who favorably recall jazzier Zs, and Bassoon will also entertain. At Death By Audio, 49 S. 2nd St., Williamsburg. 8pm doors, $tba ($8?).

Baltimore’s Ecstatic Sunshine may have recently lost co-founding guitarist Dustin Wong to Ponytail, but, now a three piece drone outfit encasing remaining original member Matt Papich’s guitar plucking in streaming layers of reverb and bleary sample effects, the band still manages to live up to their name. With suddenly-everywhere electro/disco opener White Williams and Rings, formerly First Nation, whose, lush, semi-theatrical synth-pop I am having trouble describing after one sweep through their MySpace page (but I’m really intrigued). At Studio B. 259 Banker Street at Meserole, Greenpoint. 8pm doors, $12.

Monday, 11 February :: The very first Market Hotel show on Saturday sounds good, sure, but here’s the one I’m really excited about: spare, dynamic L.A. post-punk two-piece No Age, ever-excellent lush polyrhythmic psych-pop High Places, Rings, and Telepathe-linked dance project Skint. 957 Broadway at Myrtle, Bushwick. 9:30pm, $8.

Tuesday, 12 February :: Post-hardcore rave-punks Team Robespierre, debut album Everything’s Perfect now officially out and gathering momentum, riotous live shows already semi-legendary, seem to be moving pretty fast these days, so see that semi-legendary live show now while you can do it without giant crowds. Bowery might not be the best place — the album release party at Death By Audio probably wins out there — but Bowery is still better than Webster or the like. Opening for the Foals. 7:30 doors, $15.

FREE: Williamsburg’s Zebulon never charges a cover and yet, the cozy bar at 258 Wythe and Metropolitan still hosts luminaries like Zs and this jazz quartet that I can only expect the very best from: experimental trumpet player Peter Evans who can elicit squeals and whines I never though possible from the instrument, and even, apparently, more than one pitch at a time in special cases, with People’s Kevin Shea and Mary Halvorson, and bassist Reuban Radding. There should be some really interesting things happening here.

Tomorrowland:
13 Feb :: Talibam!, Talk Normal, Spectre Folk, and Hundred Eyes at Glasslands. 9pm doors, $5
13 Feb :: Sightings and True Primes at Union Pool. 8pm, $tba
14 Feb :: These Are Powers, Knyfe Hits, Apes (CA, not THE Apes), Mixel Pixel, and Puttin’ on the Ritz at Cakeshop
14 Feb :: Jason Ajemian w/ Jessica Pavone, Matt Bauder, Mary Halvorson & Chad Taylor at the Rose, 345 Grand St. Brooklyn
15 Feb :: Pissed Jeans, Mi Ami (ex Black Eyes), Food for Animals, President (ex Q and Not U) at Silent Barn
15 Feb :: Susie Ibarra at Issue Project Room.
15 Feb :: Mostly Other People Do the Killing at the Purl
15 Feb :: Les Sans Culottes at Cakeshop
16 Feb :: Vivian Girls (with Video Hippos?) at Bikes in the Kitchen TBA
16 Feb :: caUSE co-MOTION record release at Cakeshop
18 Feb :: Calvin Johnson, Fred Thomas (of Saturday Looks Good to Me), Karl Blau at Lutheran Church of the Messiah.
20 Feb :: Mary Halvorson and Phillip Greenlief (saophone) at The Stone (Avenue C and 2nd St., East Village)
21 Feb :: FREE: Bon Iver CD release at Soundfix Records
22 Feb :: Extra Life tour sendoff at Union Pool
22 Feb :: Death Vessel at Pete’s Candy Store.
23 Feb :: Flying record release, with Mixel Pixel and friends, at Cakeshop
23 Feb :: Black Dice at Market Hotel
23 Feb :: Video Hippos Brooklyn tba
23 Feb :: Atlas Sound (Bradford Cox of Deerhunter) at Mercury.
24 Feb :: Mostly Other People Do the Killing at Cornelia St. Cafe
28 Feb :: Alarm Will Sound: “a/rhythmia” at Carnegie (John Adams, Venetian Snares, Ciconia, etc)
29 Feb :: Parts & Labor at Death By Audio
29 Feb :: High Places, Lucky Dragons, Soft Circle, and Picture Plane at Market Hotel
29 Feb :: Katie Eastburn at Newsonic
01 Mar :: Ponytail, Genghis Tron, Aa, Shooting Spires, Chevue, and Double Dagger at Market Hotel.
03 Mar :: Wham City presents: SHOOT HER! the Jurassic Park play, at Silent Barn.
03 Mar :: Slow/Dynamite, Monolith, Tournament at Goodbye Blue Monday
05 Mar :: ICETANK! VI: Sonic Meditations, David Schotzko, solo percussion.
05 Mar :: Peter Evans Quartet at Zebulon
06 Mar :: An Albatross, Golden Error, and Fun Machine at Death By Audio.
06 Mar :: Peter Evans, Mary Halvorson, Ned Rothenberg, and Alex Waterman at the Stone
10 Mar :: Child Abuse, Telepathe, and RTX at Glasslands
10 Mar :: Video Hippos at Knitting Factory
12 Mar :: Frog Eyes at Mercury
12 Mar :: Great Lakes at Glasslands
13 Mar :: Amy Kohn at Cornelia st. Cafe
14 Mar :: Peter Evans, Steve Beresford, and Okkyung Lee at Roulette
19 Mar :: Mary Halvorson Trio at the Stone (Avenue C and 2nd St., East Village)
21 Mar :: Alarm Will Sound: “1969″ at the Kitchen
22 Mar :: Alarm Will Sound: “1969″ at the Kitchen
22 Mar :: A Place to Bury Strangers at Music Hall of Williamsburg
22 Mar :: Old Time Relijun at Death By Audio
23 Mar :: Old Time Relijun Easter show at Knitting Factory
26 Mar :: Team Robespierre, Crystal Castles, and Health at Mercury
26 Mar :: Services and Golden Error at Death By Audio.
27 Mar :: ICE and John Zorn at Miller Theatre
27 Mar :: F*ck Buttons at Music Hall of Williamsburg
28 Mar :: Extra Life, These Are Powers, and Skeletons at Silent Barn
28 Mar :: Peter Evans and Nate Wooley at the Hell’s Kitchen Festival
28 Mar :: F*ck Buttons at Bowery
29 Mar :: Japanther and the Pharmacy tba
31 Mar :: Health, Telepathe, and High Places at Knitting Factory
02 Apr :: ICETANK! VII: The Music of Nathan Davis
06 Apr :: Peter Evans Quartet at Jimmy’s 43 Restaurant (43 E. 7th st)
17 Apr :: Pterodactyl at Cakeshop
02 May :: Stars of the Lid for the Wordless Music series
21 May :: Talibam at Zebulon

Until next week, live without dead time.

Related posts:

1. NYC: Sans Temps Morts
2. Sans Temps Morts: Tuesday November 18, 2008
3. NYC: Sans Temps Morts
4. Sans Temps Morts: Monday November 17, 2008
5. Sans Temps Morts: Weekend Listings

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