Louisville's giant Forecastle music festival, taking place July 12-14 (the same weekend as Cincinnati's Bunbury Music Festival), today announced its preliminary lineup. Headliners include Avett Brothers, The Black Keys, The Flaming Lips, Animal Collective, Jim James, Crow Medicine Show, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Big Boi, Matt & Kim and Alabama Shakes. The festival is held annually at Louisville's Waterfront Park, though this year there will be special "off site" late night shows.

Below is the full lineup. For tickets (which go on sale Wednesday at noon) and complete information, click here.

The Black Keys
The String Cheese Incident
The Avett Brothers
The Flaming Lips
Alabama Shakes
Jim James
Animal Collective
Old Crow Medicine Show
Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
The Forecastle Incident (with special guests)
Young the Giant
Big Boi
Matt & Kim
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
Purity Ring
The Joy Formidable
Datsik
Dawes
Griz
Kurt Vile & The Violators
Toro y Moi
Bob Mould Band
El-P & Killer Mike
Baauer
Bombino
Moon Taxi
Freakwater
Foxygen
Greensky Bluegrass
Wild Belle
Tift Merritt
TOKiMONSTA
Shovels & Rope
Salva
Night Beds
MNDR
Churchill
Ryan Hemsworth
Rubblebucket
Alasdair Roberts & Friends
Mona
The 23 String Band
Wheeler Brothers
A Lion Named Roar
The Pass

Hard to believe, but the annual South By Southwest music showcase/festival/conference in Austin, Tex., kicks off in only 11 days. As always, the huge event is featuring some artists from the Greater Cincinnati area. Two SXSW-bound local acts are playing kick-off shows soon to help raise some funds for the trip (the price of gas today makes traveling all the more difficult for independent acts).

• Great Cincy rockers The Harlequins are heading to Austin for SXSW for the first time. The band is slated to perform at the festival on March 16 with the esteemed Gringo Star. Frontman Michael Oliva says the group will be playing shows on the way to and from the festival in Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky.

The Garage/Psych Rock trio — which is planning a new EP release in April — is performing its "bon voyage" show on March 7 at Over-the-Rhine's MOTR Pub with guests Stephen Paul Smoker. The show is free, but the band will be offering a limited edition screen print of the night's show poster (right over there, to the left) for $5. The band is also sweetening the pot by releasing a new single for free at the MOTR gig.

You can also help The Harlequins out by donating to their gas/van rental fund online. In keeping with their DIY ethic (the group got into the festival without any label or other backing, a rarity these days), the band is eschewing Kickstarter in favor of direct donations through their secure Paypal account, accessible on the trio's official site. Here's the link to donate. Below is a little video spiel if you need further convincing.



• Always dazzling Indie Pop locals The Seedy Seeds are returning to SXSW this year, journeying to Austin with pals The Ridges, a fantastic Athens, Ohio-based orchestral Indie Folk squad that has become a favorite in Greater Cincinnati thanks to regular show dates locally. The two bands will be performing shows together around the South and Midwest on their way to Austin.

The groups team up for a show at the Southgate House Revival on March 6. The Seedy Seeds are encouraging fans to purchase advanced tickets to the "Supercolossal Little Giant Ye Olde South by Southwest Sendoff Show"; for just $6, if you buy your tickets before "day of show," you will receive a hand-draw postcard from the Seedys while they are on the road. Click here to get your tickets now.

Here's a piece of groovy promo featuring both bands and the tour dates.

Brian Penick of local music promotions company The Counter Rhythm Group is guest blogging for CityBeat monthly to provide a behind-the-scenes look at his journey to release his interactive industry guidebook, Musicians' Desk Reference. For more on the project, visit its Facebook page here.

Wow, what a month. Extreme highs and lows, minimal sleep and a work schedule that would make an outsider believe I had an armed guard with a shotgun pointed at my back … which in some regard is true, except that I am playing both roles.

I am going to attempt to make this blog entry significantly shorter than the last because, as you may have guessed, I have more work to accomplish. The ever-looming deadline for South by Southwest (SXSW) is creeping up and preparations with everything surrounding the presence of Musicians’ Desk Reference at SXSW grow almost exponentially by the day. 

This will be my fifth year attending the Austin, Tex., festival/conference (the largest music-related event in the US), and while it is my second time going without performing, I can already tell that this will be my busiest year ever. Taking meetings, handing out promo material and managing schedules for myself and my team are just a few of the things that will fill my week-long itinerary, all for the pursuit of introducing Musicians’ Desk Reference to some select individuals for endorsement. 

While there are many different potential outcomes to this journey, I feel confident that my inevitable glass of top-shelf Kentucky bourbon at the end of the week will be a salute to success rather than a drowning of sorrows.

The obvious focus of this month, or at least what the intention was to focus on, was our Kickstarter campaign for Musicians’ Desk Reference (our upcoming music industry progression eBook for you newcomers). We still have a little over a week to go and time will tell what the final outcome is. My original goal was to have the funding reached by interested parties to eliminate the need for a third party publisher, ultimately keeping the cost down for the user.

Click here to view the project's Kickstarter page.

In the event that this goal is not obtained in early March, never fear, as those who know me have probably deduced, I have several backup plans. Am I thorough? Yes. To the point that I am slightly neurotic? Probably. Regardless, nothing is going to stop the freight train that is Musicians’ Desk Reference. Nothing.

So in my attempt to clear my schedule for February to make way for this crowdfunding campaign, I actually ended up with a much busier month that originally anticipated. On top of all of our regular client work, The Counter Rhythm Group hosted our Locally Insourced Cincinnati Music Industry Trade Show, a fantastic show with Bad Veins, PUBLIC and The Ridges. We have been in negotiations with several of our clients for national support tours and we are in the midst of working a potentially huge licensing contract for a client.

In addition to a nationwide social media campaign and a getting ever so close to finishing the book, these past 28 days have seemingly become a marathon that we have just sprinted through. My next vacation is (literally) planned for 2015.

In closing I would like to take a second to thank not only those who have already donated to our Kickstarter, but also to those who (hopefully) will. There is still some time left (depending on when you read this; campaign ends on March 8), and sharing is something we are also encouraging folks to do. I would really like to try and go the independent route with this project, but I am prepared with other options in the end if that is not the case. At the least it has been quite a journey.

I also would like to thank those who have had to deal with my absentmindedness in (“normal,” non-music related) conversation over the past few weeks. I would like to say that this may change in the coming months, but knowing myself and how much I want to accomplish with Musicians’ Desk Reference, I would just plan on it for the next several months. It is by no means a way of stating that I do not care about what else is going on in the world, but should be viewed as a precursor to how significant I think this project can potentially be. I have dedicated literally half of my life to the music industry and I believe this is my biggest accomplishment to date. 

Goodnight, and thanks for reading!

For a limited time (while supplies last, as they say), seriously discounted tickets for the MidPoint Music Festival — which returns to the clubs and venues of Over-the-Rhine/Downtown Sept. 26-28 — will be made available starting this Friday at 10 a.m.

During this “Loyalty Presale,” three-day “All Music Access” passes can be purchased through mpmf.cincyticket.com (the site will be live for the public tomorrow) for just $49 (they’ll be $20 more come MPMF time). They are expected to sell out fast, so get ’em while you can. For those wanting a VIP MPMF experience, the popular VIP passes will also be available Friday for $129 ($40 off the normal price). The VIP tickets get you priority admission to all shows, access to catered VIP-only events and other goodies. (Last year’s VIP passes sold out before the fest.)

In other MPMF news, if you are a musician/performer interested in being considered for a showcase slot at the festival, submissions are now being accepted via Sonicbids. The submission fee is just $20 until this Friday; after that it goes up to $25. (Those without a Sonicbids account can submit to MPMF and receive a two-week free trial of the service.)

Stay tuned to MPMF.com and this blog for the latest updates on MidPoint.

The 2013 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards ceremony/party late last month at Covington’s Madison Theater was filmed on high-quality video and this Saturday, for the first time in the 16-year history of the CEAs, fans who want to relive the performances and presentations (or those who missed it altogether) will have a chance to watch the show on television.

The show includes the short but very sweet live sets from Bad Veins’ Ben Davis, The Dopamines, Gold Shoes, Ricky Nye, Jess Lamb and Culture Queer, as well as an all-star presentation of songs from the Come Play the Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams at Herzog EP put together by the Cincinnati USA Music Heritage Foundation.

Saturday at 9 p.m., thanks to the Intercommunity Cable Regulatory Commission, the full show will be aired on ICRC TV, available in select communities in the Cincinnati area via Time Warner Cable channel 4. The show will be rebroadcast on the same channel Monday at 8:30 p.m., March 1 at 10 p.m. and March 2 at noon. (Check here — in the column on the left — to see if the broadcast is available in your area.)

For those in Cincinnati proper, you can watch the CEAs on Time Warner channel 24 on Feb. 27 and on March 6 at 9 a.m. A Northern Kentucky broadcast is also in the works, as is the ability to watch the program online. Stay tuned to this here music blog for the latest updates.

If those air times don’t work for you, you can also purchase a copy on DVD. Simply email melissa@icrctv.com to inquire about delivery and prices. (Program reference number is 16534.) To relive the ceremony in photos and words, click here.

Contemporary Arts Center has officially announced that Patti Smith will perform The Coral Sea with daughter/pianist Jesse Smith on May 17, in connection with her CAC exhibit, also called The Coral Sea, that opens the next day and features work not previously seen in the U.S.

At the concert, Smith will also play selected material from throughout her career.

The CAC website says that "The Coral Sea performance work found its beginnings from Smith’s 1997 book of the same name, her requiem to her dear friend Robert Mapplethorpe (who took the cover photo of Smith’s debut album, Horses, among his many other accomplishments). With music arranged and performed live by Kevin Shields — of heralded British shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine — two separate performances were held at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in June 2005 and September 2006. In 2008 those performances were released as a live album."

Mapplethorpe's own posthumous photography retrospective at CAC, 1990's The Perfect Moment, became a major controversy when cultural conservatives led by now-retired Sheriff Simon Leis tried to shut it down for obscenity. In a famous trial, a jury sided with the CAC. The concert venue and ticket information will be announced soon at www.contemporaryartscenter.org.  

I first wrote about Smith's art show coming to the CAC in CityBeat last year here.

Despite Frank Ocean's deft leg-syncing and Taylor Swift's torture-porn-disguised-as-wholesome-circus, Akron, Ohio's Dan Auerbach and The Black Keys were The Grammys' big story last night, winning five trophies, the most of any artist.

While the Keys won the Grammys for Best Rock Album, Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance, Auerbach scored two solo Grammys for his production work, winning the trophy for Producer of the Year (Non-Classical) and also winning one for producing Dr. John's Locked Down, the Blues Album winner.

While Grammys for album winners are usually given to the producers, engineers, mastering engineers and artists, hopefully Cincinnati's Brian Olive will also score one for his work on the LP. Auerbach — who has produced albums by both Olive and Cincinnati's Buffalo Killers — enlisted Olive (an original member of Cincinnati's Greenhornes) to work on the Dr. John album. Olive has songwriting credits on every track on Locked Down, and he's also credited with playing guitar, percussion and woodwinds, as well as providing background vocals. (Check out CityBeat's profile of Olive from 2011, about his Auerbach-produced Two of Everything album, here.)

Kudos to Mr. Olive! That's him — the handsome feller with big side-burns playing sax (and a little guitar) in this video for the album's "Revolution."

Check out all the winners from last night's Grammys here, and click here or here for some extra musings about the show.

Tonight at Rohs Street Café in Clifton Heights, local musicians get an industry trade show of their very own. The “Locally Insourced: Cincinnati Music Industry Trade Show” is being presented at the venue at 6 p.m., organized by the Counter Rhythm Group and presented in conjunction with the MidPoint Music Festival.

Along with being able to register for showcase consideration at this year’s MPMF (you can also do so now via Sonicbids; click here for details), Locally Insourced is designed specifically with Greater Cincinnati musicians in mind and features booths representing various music entities in the area, from recording studios and merch makers to local labels, radio outlets and much more. Among the vendors participating: Modern Misfit Classic Genius, Southpaw Prints, Bearcast Radio, The SoundWorkshop Recording Studio, El Rey Effects, Moonbeam Studios, Moonlight Studios, CincyMusic.com, Play It Forward, Phratry Records, DMark Video Productions, Cincyticket, Coda Photography, QCA and Sebastian Illustration.

The event is free and open to all ages. Visit locallyinsourced.com for more details.

Counter Rhythm Group main-man Brian Penick has just launched a Kickstarter project for his forthcoming interactive and customizable e-book, Musicians’ Desk Reference. Here is the pitch video that explains the project very well; click here to visit the Kickstarter page and check out the various perks your donation can earn for you.

For even more on the book, attend tonight's trade show and be sure to keep an eye on this here blog, where Penick recently began guest blogging monthly updates about the project.