Happy New Year! 2008 brings your dedicated Crew back to the streets of “NOLA” for ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL, Spring Semester: THE BUILD! I don’t know about y’all, but we’re ready to put on some serious hard hats.

While purple-clad, victorious, and hungover LSU (Louisiana State University) football fans stumbled home Monday morning after a winning championship game, Tulane URBANbuild students were already hard at work on the corner of Seventh and Dryades. And as usual, we were there, filming it all.

Build Day #1, which apparently involves a significant amount of orange spray paint. They use it to mark foundation and elevation measurements – now based, not surprisingly, on new post-Katrina city regulations.

The Crew is staging in an empty NHS house up for sale, a block away from the site. We’re all on walkie-talkies, so we’re in constant communication. But walkies don’t alleviate having to run up and down the block to deliver fresh P2 cards and batteries, ask on-camera people to sign releases, or watch scenes to log notes. We assigned the crew and the students each a secret walkie code name. I said “secret” – so don’t ask…

It was a fun day, as per Casey who said, without a hint of sarcasm: “It’s better than Disneyworld.” We’ll see how long that lasts. First up – organize the toolbox!

Rachel Clift
Producer

For anyone who’s enjoyed Dominique Leone’s writing at Pitchfork over the years, it’s pretty fascinating to listen to the San Francisco-based Texan’s self-titled debut full-length, which follows his self-titled “Feedelity” EP. You can hear his beloved Brian Wilson and Harry Nilsson in the harmonies (for Nilsson, think of “Without You” and check out the first section of “Blist,” parts of “Claire,” or gorgeous album closer “Conversational”), his prog, elecrtro, disco, ABBA fixations elsewhere.

The 11-track collection starts with “Kaine,” which opens like an Animal Collective magic-wand explosion, before settling into a spacier overlap of plucked strings, audience claps, backward tones, and some death metal guitar growling, and then relocating to some sort of foreign soap opera dialog samples, etc. That’s just part of it. No song follows an easy path, but earlier this week we posted the most straightforward piece, “Duyen,” and its telephones, shakers, and walkie talkies. To get a broader sense of the album’s ornate constructions, take a listen to the up-tempo, Beach Boys-and-the-kitchen-sink standout “Nous Tombons Dans Elle.” Click here [stereogum.com] to listen to “Duyen” and “Nous Tombons Dans Elle.”

Remember, dude loves the Boredoms, too. And laughing. The album’s out at the end of May on Stromland, a label operated by Hans-Peter Lindstrom and Smalltown Supersound’s Joakim Haugland. We’re looking forward to seeing him pull these songs off live, alone with his keyboard and encyclopedic approach to composition. In case you missed this a few days ago:

Dominique Leone is out 5/20 on Stromland. www.stromlandrecords.com