Prairie Cartel | ChinaShop

Music Prairie Cartel’s Fall: Picking Up Again (Part 3 of 3)

January 26, 2010 - 10:58 am

ChinaShop’s coverage of Chicago outfit Prairie Cartel concludes in the 3rd and final entry of guitarist Blake Smith’s diary. The rough times continue as the band scrambles to make ends meet, encounter mastiffs of a nefarious nature, and jam a little Supertramp — only out of necessity, of course.

Prairie Cartel – Ten Feet Of Snow

Note :
Award-winning Chinese director Peng Lei (an accomplished filmmaker/animator whose clay animation film “Beihai Monster” from 2006 was a hit in the Chinese indie-film world and has won numerous awards) discovered The Prairie Cartel’s music online and reached out to them about wanting to
direct their video. He just completed his psychedelic urban-yeti dance video for the track “No Light Escapes Here”. As Peng explained to the lads, “The reason I wanted to direct this video was that I’m impressed with the lyrics to this song, and understand that the lyrics are about trying to express yourself artistically in an oppressive communist regime.

Musically he also felt connected, Peng Lei is a member of New Pants, one of the most revered bands in China’s contemporary music history who formed in 1996
and their early sound was influenced heavily by new wave and early punk rock, particularly the Ramones. And in true punk rock fashion, Peng takes a huge risk by using Mao all over the video.

PART 3 : FALL

By Blake Smith

Another bizarre situation fled, another season, another place to be turned into a functioning studio. How long would we be at this one? Would we actually finish this thing before something truly awful happened to one of us? We traded a tiny apartment in Wicker Park for a good-sized house in Humboldt Park. The house was a big step up from the previous hole, but the block we moved to in Humboldt was sketchy beyond belief. The street went: Housing Project, House, Housing Project, Lot Where Unspeakable Things Happened To People That Should Know Better, House, Us, Apartment Building of the Slightly Living. Across the street was a make-shift auto shop that was really a house with an aluminum fence in front of it and rusty pieces of junkyard shit on blocks scattered around the yard. They also openly sold drugs.

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Music Prairie Cartel: The Mad Summer (Part 2 of 3)

by Shop Keeper

January 22, 2010 - 11:54 am

Over the course of the next week, ChinaShop will be featuring a series of pieces on the Chicago band Prairie Cartel. This is Part 2 from a 3-Part series chronicling the group’s dealings in the precarious racket that is indie rock n’ roll. Here’s another track off their latest, Where Did All My People Go:

Prairie Cartel – Cobraskin

PART TWO: SUMMER

By Blake Smith

We had just fled from what was clearly a witch’s curse placed on the band up in Lincoln Square. Only four songs had survived from a wealth of material that had begun to dwindle, vanish, abscond, and generally decamp straight off our hard drive in swift and mysterious fashion. Mike told us he had just rented a basement apartment in Wicker Park, which is kind of a nightmare if you are normal, but really great if you are the shade of orange that can only obtained from spray-tanning or walking through an Earl Scheib with goggles on. Couldn’t be worse than what we were leaving and Mike could ride his effete Honda Scooter to his job pretty quickly which left us more time to work.

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Music Prairie Cartel: Anything and Everything Under the Sun (Part 1 of 3)

by Shop Keeper

January 20, 2010 - 11:34 am

Could Chicago electronica darlings Prairie Cartel have better luck? Could their misfortunes seem any crueler? After making their name on the soundtrack to the Grand Theft Auto video game series, P.C. seemed about to make some serious noise amongst the big boys, were lacking no acclaim from the underground music scene (being called “the next big thing out of the Windy City” by countless rags), and even receiving that rare accolade of being featured on NPR. The road to success has been anything but simple for these lads, filled with rabid dogs, Motor City Witches, and the overall flakiness that is par for the course in the business side of rock n’ roll. This is a track from the band’s Where Did All My People Go, which might help you judge for yourself:

The Prairie Cartel – Keep Everybody Warm

Over the course of the next week we’ll be giving an inside glimpse at the band’s damaged psyche, the trials and tribulations of an up-and-coming young rock band, and all the perils of rock and roll decadence (that a studio and Lincoln Square can offer).

PART ONE: SPRING
by Blake Smith

Mike and I had just gotten dropped from a major label. Again. And again we had taken a perfectly good band, gotten it signed, and then proceeded to watch it get bent, spindled, and mutilated by the machine. What started as something respectable was now a junked-out shell of a group hunkered out in the alley trying to blow you for radio play. The problem was that we were in the alley voluntarily. When fed that classic label bit that our album was great, but just needed that one immediate track that radio couldn’t possibly refuse, we didn’t fight it. Fuck, we would write you four songs for radio. By tomorrow, if it meant the good songs got to stay on. But to get on radio you have to write shit. And once you showed an A&R guy how easily you could turn shit out, you were doomed. Your record quickly ceases to resemble what you thought you had made. We were screwed (again). Why couldn’t we learn?
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