It's a lucid dream come true for music fans!

Lucid Culture is a rapidly growing website toting live music and much of the NY music scene through an online presence that is rapidly increasing in popularity.  It was created in April 2007 from a now-defunct music and politics e-zine and remains the antidote for music lovers who crave reviews for the local live music scene.

Now going through a small, but worthwhile revamp, the site has more to love including a live music calendar, countdowns of the best songs around, reviews of top albums, and a constantly updated guide to New York area live music venues.

Tell me about the start of the blog Lucid Culture and why it was created? Where did it come from?

I used to book bands at clubs in the East Village in NYC, and I'd send out a list of who was playing when to my email list. That morphed into an e-zine that grew to include a pretty much fullscale live music calendar, and then album reviews and the occasional political rant - this was back in the early days of the Bush regime, when everybody was furious about the coup d'etat in 2000, and then the Iraq war. When we first started Lucid Culture it was to create an online presence for the e-zine, although for a couple of months we flailed around, trying be all things to all people - part Salon, part Time Out NY and also something of an alternative to Daily Kos. What we didn't know is that the place we envisioned for all the disenchanted Daily Kos people would turn out to be Political Flesh Feast. When PFF came into existence, only a few weeks after Lucid Culture started up, it seemed to me that it didn't make much sense to reinvent the wheel. So at that point we became more focused on music, and live music in particular.

You say Lucid Culture is where you might discover the next Aimee Mann or Gogol Bordello before they get really popular. Mention some of the stars you’ve discovered on Lucid Culture.

What sort of resources do you offer on Lucid Culture?

Our most popular resource is our NYC live music calendar. We usually put out a new one every month. This month's is really lame because with everything going on behind the scenes we haven't had time to put up one that's as exhaustive and informative as we usually do - hopefully by November we'll be completely back on track. We also have a list of NYC live music venues that's always growing, and constantly updated. We also have a MySpace page which links to a whole bunch of our favorite bands, but like an awful lot of people, we're pretty much fed up with MySpace and its super-slow, dysfunctional interface so we haven't updated that page in awhile. When we're up and running at full speed again - like I said, hopefully by November, you can just bookmark our main page and you'll find album reviews,reviews of live shows as well a link to our Song of the Day (we're counting down the 666 best songs of alltime right now; after that we'll do the 666 best albums and if Lucid Culture still exists after that, maybe the 666 greatest musical artists), and our weekly Tuesday Top 10 Songs countdown.

This is a guitar site so I must ask how big of an influence guitarists have on this site, have you featured guitarists in the past, etc

Guitarists get tons of ink here - if you're into guitar music you're definitely in the right place. Debra, who is the lead player in the excellent psychedelic rock band Devi (http://www.myspace.com/devirock) gave us her top albums lists; we've also reviewed guitarists as diverse as Matt Munisteri, Jim Campilongo, Steve Ulrich of Big Lazy, Bill Frisell,  Pete Galub, jazz legend Gene Bertoncini, Steve Earle's lead player Eric "Roscoe" Ambel, the DITHER guitar quartet...lots of guitarists. No matter what you may hear elsewhere, the guitar is still THE main instrument in rock and we intend to keep people aware of that!

Lucid Culture is going through a revamp. Tell me about some of the new things the site is offering starting this month

This is pretty boring, it's mostly infrastructure stuff. But I think - I hope! - it will pay off in terms of functionality and will enable us to provide more content, more information, more useful stuff for readers.

You have a fairly comprehensive, detailed constantly updated guide to NewYork area live music venues.  What do the Lucid Culture editors believe are some of the best places to see live guitarists in NYC?

Depends on what kind of music you like. Lakeside is twang central. Rodeo Bar has lots of good guitar-driven bands coming through. If you like jazz the Jazz Standard is a favorite place of mine. Cornelia St. and Smalls have guitar jazz too. Stephane Wrembel who is practically the reincarnation of Django Reinhardt plays Barbes most Sundays; Matt Munisteri and Jim Campilongo play there a lot, as do a lot of other really killer players. Sadly, there's no one rock club in town that you can single out as having the best bands or the best players. Spikehill in Williamsburg books a lot of very diverse rock acts, so you'll do better there than any other place I can think of. Trouble is that this being New York, indie rock is everywhere. And as you know it's verboten in indie rock to play an instrument with any kind of proficiency - if you actually learn to play the thing, you might sound good and that would show up all those inept indie bands for the posers they really are.

Tell me about the creation of the list for the Top 666 Songs of All Time.  Why the number 666, what kind of songs?

The list itself was the product of being downsized. Imagine that you're in a position that's going to be eliminated at the end of the year. Do you keep working, or do you say to yourself, the hell with it, let them fire me if they want. That's what I did. The list started out as just a way to look busy on the job, a lark really. The kind of thing where you have two guys emailing back and forth, "No way, Lucifer Sam is WAY better than Comfortably Numb!"

I never thought to do anything with it until the stock market crash last year, when all of a sudden Lucid Culture lost two-thirds of its traffic overnight. So in an effort to resuscitate the site I looked around at the other music blogs and discovered that their most popular posts are invariably the lists. Then it hit me, I could actually use this thing, albeit with some heavy editing. I took off most of the classic rock, because pretty much everyone knows that stuff, and substituted all the great songs I could think of, especially from New York artists, that I thought people would find interesting. Evidently they do - the list gets a whole lot of hits. The number 666 was just a way to differentiate the list from all the other "best songs of alltime" lists out there - the Rolling Stone list is 500, I think - the guy who does music reviews on NPR has a list of a thousand - it's not a reference to heavy metal or satanism. Although a lot of the songs are pretty dark.

Why focus on live music as opposed to recordings? What do you believe you can get out of seeing a live performance rather than hearing a recording (especially where instruments like guitar are concerned.)

While reports of the demise of the cd are highly overrated, it's become clear that bands aren't recording to the extent that they used to - we are in a depression after all and a lot of bands can't even afford protools. As far as an experience is concerned, at a live show you are immersed in the music - or on the other hand it's as if you can't escape! There's also an element of surprise, the ever-present possibility of the kind of magic that you can only experience at a live show. It's also increasingly the fastest way to discover new music, to really stay ahead of the curve.

Is there a story behind the name Lucid Culture?

It's not very exciting - the name is actually a variant on the handle that one of the founding members here - who's no longer actively involved with the blog - used to write under on some of the political sites. Figures, huh? We chose it because A) he liked it and B) we thought it would generate traffic. It did, for about a week. Personally I think it's something of a misnomer, I don't consider myself particularly lucid or cultured!

What’s the future of the blog and the NY music scene in general?

You know how the blogosphere is - here today, gone tomorrow. Since we've made it this far it seems a fair bet that Lucid Culture will be around for the foreseeable future - it's been an awful lot of fun up to this point and I don't see that stopping. As far as the NYC scene is concerned, I think we're in the early stages of a musical renaissance in the purest sense of the word. A real golden age. As the major labels flounder and collapse, you'll see independent artists rise up and regain their place in the public eye. As the depression worsens and crime goes up, you'll see fewer and fewer rich parents willing to let their trust-funded spawn come to New York, and that ought to kill the whole Williamsburg indie fad for good.

There are so many little scenes here that somehow manage to thrive despite being completely shut out of the mass media and most of the blogosphere - there's a great country scene here, a gypsy music scene, there's hip-hop and of course jazz and new music. If you like music I think this era compares with the best that New York has ever seen - the jazz scene in the 50s, punk in the 70s and now a million little subgenres, some of which I think are going to explode. It's going to be an awful lot of fun to see what happens.

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Lucid Culture ROCKS, I'm a huge fan of Lucid Culture--ac

October 16, 2009     

I'm a huge fan of Lucid Culture--acidly funny and smart when it comes to both politics and music, mindblowlingly comprehensive regarding the NYC scene, and very well written. Honored that Alan mentioned my band, woot!
Debra | 10.251.197.189 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

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