Confession: Last year I put on a Ravenclaw uniform — prim school girl blouse, skirt, and silver and blue tie, wool cardigan, navy-lined robe, wand pocket armed and ready — and waited 12 hours in line for the midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. I couldn’t contain my excitement, the occasion demanded sartorial manifestation through an outfit that cost me a couple hundred to put together. Totally worth it, too: I was among my people in that theater. Until, two rows and 20 seats down, another group of costumed adults pulled out an acoustic guitar and started singing, full-throated, songs about key moments in the Harry Potter series. Other rows not only approved of this, they sang along and shouted out requests. These weren’t my people — they were something I hadn’t seen before.

Like Trekkies, Deadheads, and LARPers, hardcore Harry Potter followers inject their fantasy into as many facets of reality as possible not to escape from that reality, but to make it more closely resemble their fantasy. There are the books and movies and dressing up as characters from both; there’s a real-life sport, Quidditch, and an Harry Potter-based 501(c)3 charity. And then there is Wizard Rock (or Wrock, for short), a flourishing musical genre that gets its definition from its subject matter instead of its sound or style.  Aside from ’70s-era Filk Music, a folk genre inspired by science fiction, there’s nothing quite like Wizard Rock. And certainly nothing quite as of the moment. But as the final Harry Potter film fades from theaters, and with no new installments to look forward to, can this genre survive outside of the phenomenon it’s attached to? And if you care about music but don’t care about Harry Potter, can you find anything enjoyable inside it?

“One of my favorite things that will happen is we’ll play a club and after the show we’ll have bartenders or something come up to us and say, ‘I don’t give a damn about Harry Potter, but your show was awesome,’’ says Paul DeGeorge, co-frontman (with his brother Joe) of Harry and the Potters. “And it’s just because they can see that we’re engaging people in a different way than most bands. I think they appreciate what we’re doing as a concept than the subject matter.” His band will end their two-month U.S. tour at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory July 31. Paul is both a participant and expert in Wizard Rock — his band, which started in 2002, was the first Wizard Rock group. They coined the genre name, as a joke. But hundreds of shows (and hundred of other Wizard Rock bands) later, they play conventions, libraries and legit rock clubs (though usually for an all ages audience).

Harry and the Potters

First, some distinctions: There are three kinds of Wizard Rock songs, designed to attract fans of different ages and levels of fan engagement. At the most basic level, musicians sing directly to the narrative of Harry Potter. Bands like The Moaning Myrtles and the Hermoine Crookshanks Experience function almost as bards — telling and retelling the mini-stories throughout the novels, turning even minor characters into heroes. Another variety of Wizard Rock band (Draco and the Malfoys, The Remus Lupins) tell the stories in the novels but also travel outside this — concentrating on the hormonal atmosphere that permeates the books: unrequited love, loneliness, rejection. Sex often pops up, sometimes its graphic (girls naked under school robes comes up a bit), yet these songs usually stick to canon in a way that HP slash fiction does not. Wizard Rock bands at the third level pull back even further. These musicians — like French folk band Basilisk In Your Pasta — take the themes that J. K. Rowling instilled in the books and distill them in song. The anti-bureaucratic, anti-fascist, anti-racist messages contained inside a story about a boy wizard are the focus. There’s only a tacit agreement that we’re talking about Harry Potter — remove a few proper names and these bands could be Fugazi (coincidentally, the DeGeorge brothers’ personal heroes). Sometimes the songs are about the fan community itself. Harry and the Potters jump between all these levels, singing about events and emotions, but also releasing their own albums and booking their own tours while organizing human rights projects through the charity they co-founded, Harry Potter Alliance. This connection to human rights is common. I listened, for example, to an entire compilation of Wizard Rock bands like Roonil Wazlib and the Whomping Willows singing about independent media. Their Voldemort is Rupert Murdoch. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re just singing about Rupert Murdoch. Why, then, don’t they just sing about those things? Why marginalize yourself within a fan community? For one thing, marginalization isn’t a side effect, it’s the point. The Rupert Murdoch references aren’t just trading fictional evil for real evil: The books themselves contain a strong DIY message — when Harry is persecuted by a corrupt government, his friends turn to an independent zine and pirate radio to exonerate him. The community around Wizard Rock rewards the same spirit in their bands.

In terms of quality, Wizard Rock is not unlike other genres: There are a few genuinely good bands, a lot of maybe okay bands, and a few unlistenable bands. It’s probably no coincidence that a lot of them sound like Weezer — melodic, mid-tempo indie rock that fits the teenage yearning of the lyrics. But there’s also Dumbledork, a one-man laptop project whose songs twitch with Tigerbeat6-style micro slices, or are otherwise constructed of fluid, distant samples and beats. (I’m guessing the shift corresponds to when the artist started or stopped listening to DJ Shadow.) Voldemort is a Wizard Rock metal band who wrap their songs around the novels’ mystical and dark creatures — serpents, owls, wolves. In that way, they’re not much different from other metal bands. And then there are bands who play on one single element of the Potter series. Paul DeGeorge likes Mermaids Above Water. In the Harry Potter universe, mermaid language sounds like screeching when the speaker is out of water, so the music follows suit. “It’s these loungey piano songs, and then this white noise layered on top that’s really screechy,” Paul says. “That plays to a much, much more limited audience of me and like 10 other people who think that’s a funny joke.”

We’re too close to the pop culture phenomenon of Harry Potter to know if it’ll thrive the way Star Wars or Star Trek has. DeGeorge pointed out that his band’s gigs keep bringing in new audiences.  “It’s so cool to see not just the books being passed down to the kids but our music as well. Because these parents are cool and they play loud music in the car,” DeGeorge says. It’s not a huge leap to envision a time — maybe a couple decades from now, when those kids are old enough to start bands — where musical references to the Harry Potter novels will be an accepted quirk of a band, rather than their defining characteristic, like Led Zeppelin sprinkling Lord of the Rings references into “Ramble On” and “Battle of Evermore.” Or perhaps Harry Potter itself could stand in for its themes, much as Alice In Wonderland became shorthand for jarring and unverifiable experiences in Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” I guess my hope is kinda big, then: for Harry Potter to die as a pop culture phenomenon and rise as part of the cultural lexicon.

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Lil Wayne

Remember when Lil Wayne was the weird one? In 2006, when Weezy’s career started picking up its second wind with the release of still-astonishing Dedication 2 mixtape, he was the touchstone for avant-gardism in rap, the purped-out, bloodshot-eyed spitter whose magic in the booth could have been conjured by mysticism as easily as anything else (though you’d probably put some of your money on weed). His metaphors were creatively unparalleled in rap, his voice a smoked out croak. He leered like Peter Jackson’s Gollum, and when he started noodling on guitars, the effect was that of someone play-acting in a rock film, waiting for a soloing overdub that never came. Possibly one of the most accidentally performance-art concerts in rap music ever was his 2008 appearance at Summer Jam, in which Wayne, clearly inebriated on some unidentifiable concoction, brought a previously hyped 40,000 or so crowd to a halt by pounding a poorly-tuned axe with impunity, vaguely crooning syllables into a microphone. The crowd just wanted to hear “Lollipop.” It was awkward, much in the same way Marina Abramovic making eye contact while nude and weeping is awkward — there’s no roadmap for where to go, what to do.

"Sorry 4 the Wait"

Now, though, they’re figuring it out. Wayne’s obviously the godfather of today’s much-touted “weirdness movement” in rap music, though psychic progeny like Lil B and SpaceGhostPurrp are crafting odder (if not stonier) movements, and Death Grips and B L A C K I E are releasing harder (and much better) rap-metal. So it makes sense that now, after stumbling through a possible addiction, lyrical brilliance, a greatest rapper alive pedestal, and a stint in prison (following a gun charge the NYPD used DNA technology to connect him to, albeit tangentially) on his recent mixtape Sorry 4 the Wait, Lil Wayne sounds gleaming. Pure. Tangibly squeaky clean. He’s flipped a switch.

Wayne rarely releases weak commercial singles, and his recent run from his forthcoming album, the Carter IV, proves the point: The monsters “6’7”” and “John” are still interminable after half a year, and the more recent “How to Love” transposes the moment’s current Drake-worshiping emotionalism into Taylor Swift territory (which is, obviously, awesome). Anticipation is high for his commercial release, but Sorry 4 the Wait might prove a point another, more cynical point I’ve been reluctantly weighing since clean Wayne was released. Sans the crag that regular herbalism caught in his throat, a voice unrasped by regular smoke, the question begs: Was weeded Weezy better at mixtapes? More importantly, were Lil Wayne mixtapes better before Drake popularized the punchline rap? Sigh.

One of the glorious points of Lil Wayne’s previous tapes was listening to his sometimes nonsensical, non-rapped interludes — little conversation skits that were a precursor to Lil B’s stream of consciousness raps. 2008’s Da Drought 3 had some of the loopiest, with Wayne audibly taking puffs between thoughts, heavily flanged as though he was recorded in an anti-gravity chamber. That mixtape’s outro, set jovially to Robin Thicke’s “Lost Without You,” served as a kind of liner notes, thank yous and shout outs eked out between ice-mouth giggles. Comparatively, Sorry 4 The Wait’s outro, equally odd juxtaposed on Beyonce’s Major Lazer beat for “Girls Who Run The World,” expands with a helilum-like happiness, Wayne yelling Southern barks over unintelligible acknowledgements. The track comes right after his “Inkredible” freestyle, on which he delivers a verse with unparalleled enthusiasm — really, there aren’t many rappers right now with better delivery than this dude — but recycles ideas he’s already used to better effect. Or, with the onslaught of rap music flirting deeper and deeper into the avant-garde, it’s possible we’re just getting desensitized.

The answer may lie on “Grove Street Party,” Wayne’s collaboration with Lil B. The relationship between the two is stark: Wayne is the elder and — however popular B’s positive mental attitude-touting verses become with the under 25s — he’s clearly doing B a favor, and will forever be the better rapper. But remarkably, in a world where one-time teen sensation Soulja Boy has scored a hit encouraging people to enjoy the deadly combo of Xanax and Codeine syrup (“Zan with that Lean”), surely it means something that two self-professed clean rappers are on a track together trading off-kilter verses about their crews. One of Wayne’s most legendary lines is “I’m so motherfucking high I could eat a star”; maybe now he can just become one.

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Mr. Dream plays the 4Knots Music Festival at South Street Seaport on July 16.

The Village Voice ran the Siren Music Festival — an annual, free, sweaty day of music on Coney Island — for 10 years. This year, they’ve renamed it the 4Knots Music Festival and moved it from Brooklyn to Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. It’s still free and, chances are, still sweaty. Black Angles and Titus Andronicus headline the show, with five other acts. Mr. Dream is a Brooklyn trio that plays the kind of music that will get you through the heat. Their songs are short, fast, and prickly, calling to mind Steve Albini’s lean and noisy production work of the ’90s. The band’s drummer, Nick Sylvester, is also the founding writer of this column. He often used the space to discuss the details of recording with musicians and producers, so I thought it would be appropriate to turn some of those questions back on him, singer/bassist Matt Morello and singer/guitarist Adam Moerder (also a writer who’s written for Pitchfork and the New Yorker). We discussed their use of space, their decision-making process, deciding what stays and what goes. Trash Hit, the debut album they released in March, provoked a lot of these questions because, at times, you almost forget there are decisions being made — the record has a naturalistic and spontaneous feel, as though it simply popped out fully-formed, recorded in real-time. It has the uncanny ability to sound both unsteady and completely self-assured.

Riff City: The first thing I hear on Trash Hit is space, but more like holding your breath space. It’s very tense space. How much of writing and recording for Mr. Dream is taking away or throwing away stuff?

Nick Sylvester: That’s awesome to hear you’re hearing that, the space. Part of it is we’re a three-piece and don’t do much more than broad strokes. We like the sound of “broad strokes,” which means space is a huge consideration — too much, too little, the difference between a chorus that “breathes” and one that, I don’t know, just sounds kinda thin. So a riff either works for us or it doesn’t. We rarely take anything away in our songs, or make it work. We usually just trash the whole idea and move onto the next.

As for recording, I really love the sound of space in records — headroom, I mean, really just when a mix isn’t super cooked. Something like PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me gets so much of its creep and energy from the dynamic range. The microphones are picking up more of the room at first, and the instruments sound different when the volume jumps. The aesthetic is more inhale-exhale than quiet-loud. A lot of Rare Book Room records have that same quality: Talk Normal’s Sugarland, Sightings’ Arrived In Gold. Anyway, we like records that sound like that.

Adam Moerder: As a three-piece, we were initially concerned with filling out space, so we played barreling punk songs that involved all three of us playing fortissimo during pretty much every beat of every measure. That gets old fast, so fortunately by the time we started working on Trash Hit we were getting a better handle on how to use space, i.e., understanding how it can become a secret weapon instead of this thing that’d expose us as an inadequate band.

RC: As far as using ideas or trashing them — you’ve got such a clear idea of what Mr. Dream is and isn’t. Does that make is easier or harder to be spontaneous?

NS: There are no hard fast rules about what Mr. Dream is or isn’t, at least musically. Nothing is preordained, as far as I know. I tend to trust the moments when all three of us really love an idea, as to whether or not it’s a good one. There’s no vote or anything. To Trash Or Not To Trash happens in a very spontaneous way when we’re playing something for the first time. We never know what we’re gonna like until we like it, if that makes sense. That said, my hope is we’ll be a microhouse revival band by album four.

AM: Ironically, some early versions of my personal favorites from Trash Hit were almost scrapped because we worried they were outside our wheelhouse. Then they became part of our wheelhouse. So I may sometimes feel like I have this idea of what Mr. Dream is and what it sounds like, but that archetype is constantly challenged, usually for the better.

RC: I wonder if any part of the above could be part of how long you all have thought and written about music. Everyone’s their own worst critic, right?  It seems like that background would make it impossible to finish anything.

Matt Morello: It’s funny, despite being the non-former-critic in the band, I feel like I probably have the hardest time finishing stuff. Which to me makes sense, since Nick and Adam were only critics (as opposed to people with opinions about music, which is everyone) by virtue of having written, edited, finished, and published a lot of work, to say nothing of all the work they probably junked. So I think we actually benefit from their experience with craft and process, to say nothing of all the time spent listening to stuff and trying to tell other people how it made them feel and why.

I guess people get hung up on the idea that critics are always judging and ranking and, well, criticizing, in the negative sense of pointing out flaws. Leaving aside all the actual annoying bullshit many critics and critical publications engage in — and I mean, let’s not even get started — there’s also lots of insecurity about taste that leads to a “who the fuck does this guy think he is” attitude toward critics. They’re snobs, haters, whatever. And it’s the same question for any musician or artist, you know, “Who the fuck does this guy think he is? What is this weird ego adventure? Why does he think he has anything to say?” Though mostly you ask yourself that about yourself.

I’d guess the answer for most artists and critics is that, when it’s good, it’s really, really exciting. So while we throw stuff out pretty quickly if it doesn’t work, maybe even too quickly sometimes, we also get really, really excited when something does work, and that excitement kind of drives the whole thing forward.

RC: You guys talk a lot about being out of touch with new bands and not listening to new music as much as you used to. How do you think that’ll work now that you’re on festival bills? Doesn’t that make backstage conversation awkward?

MM: Guess we’ll see. We all spent some time in literature seminars in college, so I think we can hold our own when it comes to talking about things we’re not prepared to discuss.

AM: When in doubt, talk about gear. I’ve been in 20-minute conversations backstage that started with a simple “How do you get that distortion?” and spiraled out from there.

RC: You weren’t hearing the kind of music you wanted to hear, so you decided to make it yourself. Does the same apply to Brooklyn?

NS: All three of us have obsessive stan-like tendencies when it comes to bands we love, so recording and putting together bills have taken this to a new level. I recorded a 7” for Sleepies that came out this past April, and my friend Matt LeMay and I just did one with Matty Fasano, who is like a grittier James Blake. Playing bills with White Suns and Yvette, let alone being in a situation where they actually reply to your personal emails, is a big-time thrill.

RC: Nick, this is an interview for a column you started, which I’m guessing feels a little strange. I noticed you asked Escort about their equipment philosophy, and there were those interviews with Chris Zane, Jared Ellison. Were those interview questions part of teaching yourself recording?

NS: Not strange at all! I interviewed people like Chris Zane and Tom Krell (How To Dress Well) about process because I wanted to tell another side of their records. I knew from recording and playing in Mr. Dream that there are a billion decisions that go into a song, and I wanted to show people how some of that stuff worked. Some of my favorite interviews are the ones with Paul McCartney about process, like when he talks about what kinds of lyrics he uses in tonic chords versus what kinds of lyrics he uses on top of dominant chords, or how he came up with the bVI-bVII-I tag for “P.S. I Love You,” and so on. This is what musicians are thinking about when they work on songs, not “does this record adequately convey a sense of the suburbs?”

Of course I wish these interviews could have taught me how to record, or how to write songs, or really anything like that, but you only learn to record by recording, making a shitload of mistakes, A/B-ing your mixes with songs you admire — very hands-on and time-intensive and usually frustrating.

RC: You’re playing a festival put on by your former employer.

NS: I know this sounds flip, but the Voice has only ever been really good to me. At worst they were fair, during all the unpleasantness. I had a bonehead idea, I executed it badly, and for whatever reason they still tried to figure out a way to keep me on staff — the management and many of the editors at the time. Since then, the publication has only ever been supportive of Mr. Dream. Maybe at 4Knots they’re gonna put me in a dunk tank that I don’t know about, or thunderdome me, Mike Lacey, and a plate of sliders, but no, I didn’t have a Mike Jones moment or anything. We’re just thrilled to be playing such a huge festival with so many great bands.

RC: Did you all go to the pre-4Knots Siren Festivals? Have those memories worked into conversations about how you’ll shape your set?

MM: The only Siren Fest I ever went to was in 2003. I was living in New Haven that summer and I’d recently “taken a break” with a girl I’d been dating for two years, so it was kind of this proof-of-agency solo mission to New York. I think it was my first time ever in Brooklyn. It was hot and there were a ton of people, and I waited in line at Nathan’s for a really long time because that seemed to be an important thing to do. I don’t think I knew about the boardwalk, though I had a sense there was some kind of beach on the other side of the stages. The only bands I remember seeing were Ted Leo and Modest Mouse, though I must have seen a couple others. I think Ted’s voice was busted but I remember him putting on a really good, energetic show. Modest Mouse played for what felt like an eternity after a day standing in the sun with a backpack by myself, especially since I only knew Lonesome Crowded West and they were hardly playing anything from it. It didn’t occur to me to leave early, because who leaves a concert early?…

The only other big outdoor music festival I’ve been to was Pitchfork Fest a couple years ago, and it confirmed some of those old Siren feelings, namely that my favorite thing in that situation is a really loud rock band that plays the hell out of a set that doesn’t go on too long. Fortunately, this is how we play every show.

RC: And there’s the most important festival bill question: Will you be the kind of band that takes off their shirts for outdoor shows?

MM: I think any of us is prepared to play without a shirt if that’s what the show calls for, definitely. But you can’t know that kind of thing in advance, it has to happen in the moment. You don’t really want that to be a thing. Look at what happened to D’Angelo — that guy is still waiting to have a normal, non-godlike torso so that doesn’t have to be a thing anymore and he can just be one of the greatest geniuses in music. I would hate to see that happen to Adam.

Mr. Dream’s “Trash Hit” video:

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Iconoclastic ingenue Rita Indiana will play at both SummerStage (as a part of LAMC) and at The Spot this summer.

About five years ago, I saw the New York bachata group Aventura headline Madison Square Garden. Riding high off their mega-hit “Un Beso,” a tender ballad with virtuoso guitar work, the sold-out crowd was collectively palpitating, not just at the R&B-informed smoothness of heartbreaker lead Anthony Santos (they nicknamed him “Romeo” for a reason), but at the profound pride of seeing hometown sons, first-generation Dominicans from the Bronx, ascend to perform in this hallowed hall. They were joined onstage by a procession of Latin pop royalty, including reggaeton stars Wisin y Yandel and Don Omar, and the audience waved Dominican and Puerto Rican flags, a show of musical unity. That specific show was later made into a well-received live recording, and in January 2010 Aventura performed once again at Madison Square Garden, for a series of farewell shows that sold out so quickly they had to keep adding more. In the end, they played four last-shows-ever in the arena. Four.

So why, when a group like Aventura attains deified status and tops Billboard, does it seem like sometimes the Latin music conversation is only happening within Latin music? Major New York newspapers covered the show, but it still felt like a self-contained event. Even when Latinos comprise the second-most populous ethic group in the city (or first, we’ll find out July 12 when they government drops our state census numbers — I personally wrote in “Chicana”) it feels like a marginal situation. If mainstream media is to be believed, Latin music consists exclusively of salsa, Shakira and J.Lo. Oh, and mariachis, but only in restaurants, amirite?!

And when it comes to parsing out music scenes within various Latino groups in the city, things only seem to get stranger. Latinos in New York come together for big box event concerts — a Marc Anthony show is like a Latin American UN convention. But outside of the huge-draw musicians, it can be hard to connect sounds, styles, people and boroughs — particularly when it comes to flourishing subcultural and/or newer genres like digital cumbia, tropical, ruidoson and the ever-nebulous “global bass” music.

“It’s really difficult challenging preconceived notions of what a Latin party should sound like,” says Geko Jones, a producer and DJ for celebrated New York tropical night Que Bajo?, held at Santos Party House. “In the Heights, you have a lot more Dominicans, so you have to know what they like. In Queens, there are more Mexicans, Central and South Americans so there, too, you have to know how to play to win. Uptown in the Bronx you have that whole boricua roots, bomba plena y salsa movement, and again you face challenges. The reason we’ve positioned ourselves in LES is to serve as a middle ground for all these sounds to come together along with other forms of Afro-Caribbean and globally enhanced club sounds.”

In July, underground Latino music is having a banner month in the city, with the return of the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) and the debut of The Spot, a monthlong warehouse jam curated by Latin events and culture website