Light Asylum
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Light Asylum

New York City, New York, United States | SELF

New York City, New York, United States | SELF
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"Light Asylum"

There are so many ways to discover new music these days. Whether it be from a friend, Hype Machine, other blogs, magazines or whatever, there are SO many ways! I can chalk up my recent discovery of New York's Light Asylum to twitter. When you're going through your tweets and JD Samson calls a band "Best Band Ever!", you should probably take notice. So I did, and now I'm sharing them with you!

Light Asylum is pretty much a moniker for singer/songwriter/musician Shannon Funchess. Even if you're like me and are just discovering this project, you're probably more familiar with Shannon Funchess than you may think. She toured as a vocalist with !!! in 07/08 and was a featured on Heart of Hearts. More recently she lent background vocals to Telepathe on Dance Mother and appeared in their So Fine video. She's also worked with Bunny Rabbit and the Cult of Miracles and TV on the Radio, so between all of that stuff, you've probably at least heard Shannon Funchess' unique and fantastic voice!

As far as Light Asylum goes, she's began working with Bruno Coviello and they have a show with MEN coming up in New York, but no word on a record. She is, however, working on a record with TV on the Radio's Gerard Smith under the name Rose Parade. Let's hope for more music coming out from Shannon Funchess in 2010 in either form!

Here is Light Asylum's shallow tears remixed by Fatima Al Qadiri and the original, as well as !!!'s Heart of Hearts featuring Shannon Funchess on vocals. AND if you are in NYC, check out Light Asylum with MEN March 10 at the Mercury Lounge.
- Young Creature


"Light Asylum's Shannon Funchess Is Our New Crush"


Though all of last night's Light Asylum/Zaza show at the Knitting Factory had the audience rapt, the stand-out was Light Asylum front woman Shannon Funchess, (pictured above with bandmate Bruno Coviello) who you might have recognized from her performance a few weeks ago with LCD Soundsystem at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Her voice would best be described as the love child of David Bowie and Grace Jones. A leading lady in the Brooklyn music community, she has also contributed tracks with Telepathe, TV on the Radio, and T.K.

Zaza, formed by multi-instrumentalist Jennifer Fraser and Danny Taylor, was a great main course. With solid base and drum beats, and sultry vocals Zaza is an impressive addition to indie-pop that's been brewing across the East River.
This story was published on Apr. 21, 2010 - Paper Magazine


"Dance Track Master, Accidental Fan"

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, essentially the one-man project of James Murphy, is the connoisseur’s dance band. It emerged in 2002 already poking fun at its own snobbishness, with the single “Losing My Edge,” the hilariously fibbed bragging rights of an aging, anxious hipster. Since then Mr. Murphy, 40, has usually played the part of the guy who might be a little too cool for his own good. (“I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s,” he sang-spoke on “Losing My Edge,” which Pitchfork called the 13th best song of the 2000s.)

On a day off from his tour promoting the latest LCD Soundsystem album, “This Is Happening” (DFA/Virgin), he spoke with Ben Sisario. Mr. Murphy was relaxing in his loft on a quickly gentrifying postindustrial street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that reflects the mind of an obsessive collector eternally on the verge between clubland and adulthood. His huge collection of vinyl records was arranged in clearly labeled alphabetical order, and on a bookshelf near his wine refrigerators sat a complete set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Q. What’s your preferred way of hearing new music?

A. I prefer to find music by accident: Facebook, YouTube, recommendation from a friend. I don’t have a TV, and I don’t have a radio.

Chrome Hoof is a band I found on Facebook. An English band. Don’t know much about them, but they’ve been in metal bands and stuff before. Those turnarounds they’re playing on “Tonyte” are totally Yes. And yet it’s contemporary. Somehow it’s contemporary. And like the KLF they play in semi-mysterious outfits.

Q. How important is it to you how a band looks?

A. It’s not just a song in a vacuum. There are things that go around it: live shows, what a band looks like, what they talk like, the art they use to represent themselves.

The Fall was super powerful to me because of their covers. They were intimidating. I bought “This Nation’s Saving Grace” when it came out, in 1985, and there was something about it that made me nervous. It terrified me. Like in the song “L.A.” how the organ doesn’t sync up with the beat. And on “Paintwork” there’s a hand-held tape recorder chopping in and out.

The idea that someone just called that “done” was something I found magical. It’s like if you know science or you know math, there is a certain kind of mechanical calm when you’re like, “We’re done.”

Q. What do you think of the new Fall album, “Your Future Our Clutter” (Domino)?

A. It was recorded by my friend Ross Orton, who was in a band called the Fat Truckers. They made a seven-inch, “Superbike,” that just said, “Superbike, superbike, take me for a ride on your superbike,” over and over. It kind of sounded like Suicide. The Fall and ESG also have my favorite, super simple, slightly wrong, really funky bass. Both of them do things that are almost impossible to copy. They’re irreducible.

[Mr. Murphy pulled “Superbike” from his shelf and began spinning it on his turntable. He then cued up the first song on the Fall CD, “O.F.Y.C. Showcase,” and, using his D.J. crossfader, played both songs simultaneously, synching up the rhythms.]

It’s the same beat!

Q. You’ve said that “This Is Happening” will be your last album as LCD Soundsystem. Do you want to get back into producing bands?

A. I miss producing. I hate it when I do it, but I love it.

One of the reasons I want to be done with LCD is to be able to produce things like Light Asylum. The singer, Shannon Funchess, has a really powerful, deep alto, like a contralto — this arch, Heaven 17, Grace Jones-like voice. The production on it is a little too chatty for me, though.

Q. Chatty?

A. It’s like a room full of people talking — there’s not enough to focus on. It’s what I find wrong with most modern production. It started in the late 1980s, when people started having a lot of technology at their fingertips. Things started to become a lot less cohesive. With a computer you have access to so many drum sounds and samples that your snare drum will be unrelated harmonically to your kick drum. But take early Human League, or “Sweet Dreams”-era Eurythmics. The sounds are really specific. There’s just a couple of synthesizers.

Light Asylum’s song “A Certain Person” has an out-of-time chord progression on the synth, this amazing Philip Glass 3-against-4 thing. The sound is just nice and simple. And all the different drum sounds, although they’re creating something I kind of like, a sort of psychedelic space, it seems a little unfocused to me. I like the force of a simple set of things struggling for space.

Q. How did you begin working with Janine Rostron of Planningtorock?

A. I found Planningtorock on a blog years ago because someone sent me a link to something else. The video for “When Are You Gonna Start” was also on this blog, and I became obsessed with what she was doing. The video is mesmerizing — very strange and very normal at the same time. It’s in this crazy old mansion-y place out in Germany, and it looks otherworldly, but you can also see people just milling around.

It seems like part of a weekend trip where you might eat food, rather than a video, but in it’s not casual, it’s not slacker. It’s really mannered. It’s like the early Wegman films, where what he is doing seems very integrated into his day.

[With a few quick punches on his laptop, Mr. Murphy played the video on YouTube.]

I love how this manages to be super arch but not cartoonish to me. And I love how good the panda makeup is.

I love Janine’s voice. Super powerful, super singular. She uses it like an instrument, and she sings the way I like people to sing. It’s not necessarily pretty, but she has a really powerful voice. People like that, who have a lot of control, get to do things unconsciously that I think are pretty amazing. She’s directing my next video.

Q. Is that a white chain around her neck?

A. Yeah, she sewed it. She made this one for me. [He picks up an oversize, puffy necklace, with interlocking links like a chain, and the letters LCD dangling from it.]

Q. Wow. Why do you not wear that all the time?

A. Well, I do, just around the house. - The New York Times


"Grace on Fire: Light Asylum shines a light in the dark and takes Brooklyn by storm"

In Brooklyn bands are cheap. But every once in a while, a band comes around that stops you dead in your tracks, and since everyone here walks around with their ears open, when it’s on, it is on. Right now that band is Light Asylum. A two-piece consisting of Shannon Funchess on vocals and Bruno Coviello on electronics, Light Asylum seems to be everywhere you turn. With their guttural, unabashed style, they’re quickly making a name for themselves, but this didn’t come out of nowhere. “I came here from Seattle,” Funchess explains, “where there were a lot of punk bands and D.I.Y., indie two-pieces and stuff. We would play shows with our friends, like Seven Year Bitch and Sky Cries Mary. I was here for CMJ in 1996 with another band, and I decided that I had to move here. Five years later, I made the move.”
It took her five years, but she eventually made the move in 2001 and started working with then up-and-coming groups like TV on the Radio, !!! and Telepathe. Coviello, on the other hand, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, making club tracks and house music. “I used to go see Danny Tenaglia, sneaking into all the downtown NYC clubs when I was a teenager.” It wasn’t until a few years ago, when they were both in bands on tour with the rap group Bunny Rabbit, that they met and bonded over their arcane musical tastes. According to Coviello, “I remember Shannon mentioned this obscure dark-wave band, Clan of Xymox, that only, like, a handful of people talked about—and I just knew.” Funchess adds, “I had done Light Asylum previous to Bruno, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to perform it.” When the tour was over, they reconvened in Shannon’s practice space with Coviello’s Casiotone and a fifty-dollar drum machine from 1988.
“With Bruno I wanted to start from scratch,” says Funchess. “We did that and there was just no question.” In coming together, they have produced some of the most powerful, dark and emotional music that has come out of Brooklyn in a long, long time. To figure out how that’s possible, you just need to hear Funchess explain it: “To me Light Asylum is a metaphor for the lack of genuine self-expression in the world, where people suppress their sexuality, their creativity, their entire lives. This music is for them and for people to realize that they’re not alone. The music is dark, but it’s at a place where you can see there is light at the end of the tunnel. The darkness isn’t all around us; it’s inside us.” - Tokion Magazine


"Light Asylum, Shallow Tears"

Sometime this summer, in a Chinese restaurant pretty far downtown, we saw Light Asylum. We had no idea a band was going to be playing, we just rolled up to what we thought was a birthday party. But across the other side of the parquet dancefloor was this duo playing in the dark, one man on keys and drum machines, one woman nonchalantly emoting the shit out of herself. How else to put it? Shannon Funchess, who you may know from her occasional vocal duties in !!! and Telepathe, has an enormous, operatic voice. On “Shallow Tears,” it’s as though she is trying to summon storms, like Light Asylum’s true purpose was as rainmakers. Bruno Coviello, manning the backing beat, has a fascination with the druggy, despondent synthesizers of mid-’80s science fiction. Though they’re never hulking, there’s nothing particularly dainty in either of the duo’s approaches, as though they’ve listened to a lot of Sade and figured out how to take all of her elements into the red. As it is, we heard at least one grown man say they made him cry—fair enough. For another taste of Light Asylum, check their track on the Wierd Records mix from our Freak Scene column.

Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2009/12/14/light-asylum-shallow-tears-mp3/#ixzz0r39v2hd3 - Fader


Discography

'In-Tension' tour EP (self-released)

Photos

Bio

LIGHT ASYLUM, the duo of Shannon Funchess and Bruno Coviello, is Williamsburg Brooklyn's answer to the reemergence of new romantics. Like their predecessors, they have a penchant for walking on the dark side while carrying the torch to new dawns of rapturous, post-punk, new wave and industrial sounds. Funchess moved to New York City in 2001 and started lending her powerful vocal talents to the work of then up-and-coming groups like TV on the Radio, !!! and Telepathe. Coviello, on the other hand, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, making club tracks and house music. It wasn’t until a few years ago, when they were both in bands on tour with the rap group Bunny Rabbit, that they met and bonded over their arcane musical tastes. “With Bruno I wanted to start from scratch,” says Funchess. “We did that and there was just no question.” In coming together, they have produced some of the most powerful, dark and emotional music that has come out of Brooklyn in a long, long time. To figure out how that’s possible, you just need to hear Funchess explain it: “To me Light Asylum is a metaphor for the lack of genuine self-expression in the world, where people suppress their sexuality, their creativity, their entire lives. This music is for them and for people to realize that they’re not alone. The music is dark, but it’s at a place where you can see there is light at the end of the tunnel. The darkness isn’t all around us; it’s inside us.”

LIGHT ASYLUM recently toured Europe with Coco Rosie, opened for LCD Soundsystem and Gang Gang Dance, played at the MoMA PS1 and the Whitney Biennial, and were named one of the top ten bands to watch in 2010 by NME Magazine.