This piece originally appeared in Western North Carolina’s Mountain Xpress as part of the paper’s Moogfest 2011 coverage. Each participating music writer covered a different stylistic component to the festival. Mine was Krautrock and Kosmische Musik.

The story of Krautrock — a story that is largely the product of English and American mythologizing rather than insider historical knowledge — has been told and retold. But at its core sits a handful of vitals who are worth revisiting. In the late ‘60s, Germany gave birth to a generation of underground musicians whose bold innovations in post-psychedelic sound exploration, synthesizer manipulation and groove research would go on to exert a deep and broad impact on the evolution of modern music. Post-punk, techno and house, indie, the ambient movement, hip-hop, even new age, have all been touched by the movement.

Kosmische Musik, a less commonly used moniker, is considered more or less interchangeable with Krautrock. But as culture critic Erik Davis points out in Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy, the phrase’s more refined utterances tend to encompass those German musicians who were preoccupied with “an alternately meditative and ferocious dissolution of boundaries that invoked, through sound or function or packaging, the unearthly otherworlds that link outer and inner space.” Though it’s up for debate, the group most closely associated with this heady mission has long been Tangerine Dream. Since achieving lift-off with the 1967 opus Electronic Meditation, the ensemble has undergone countless personnel changes and shifts in style, yet founder Edgar Froese’s interest in interstellar drift continues to be the primary focus.

Another veteran proponent of Kosmische Musik is Hans-Joachim Roedelius. In addition to his sprawling solo discography, Roedelius’ work with Cluster and Harmonia (the latter of which also featured fellow Moogfest performer Brian Eno for a spell) has proven to be wildly prescient in the way it blends rock music with elements of avant garde electronics, free improv and minimalism.

Krautrock’s chromosome is nestled deep inside Moogfest DNA. From The Field’s icy, motorik-flavored techno to The Flaming Lips’ discordantly peculiar permutation of space rock, there’s probably not a single musician in Asheville this weekend who isn’t familiar with Kraftwerk or Can or Faust. That said, the two artists who embody the Kosmische spark are the ambient-drone voyagers Tim Hecker and Oneohtrix Point Never.

Tangerine Dream
To fully understand just how far out T.D. ventured at the peak of its powers, Lester Bangs’ 1977 concert review “I Saw God And/Or Tangerine Dream” is mandatory reading. Amazingly, less than a decade later the group had shifted its attention to Hollywood soundtracks, among them Risky Business, Legend and the most underrated vampire movie of all time, Near Dark. Recent releases, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki series, are decidedly new age. But hey, all deep-space explorers need to return to Earth some time, right?

Hans-Joachim Roedelius
Roedelius the solo artist began producing music in the late 1970s, not long before Cluster’s first split. He’s intensely prolific, with a back catalog of more than 30 titles. His aesthetic, a mix of abstruse studio experimentation and chamber-like piano music, has grown increasingly more refined and contemplative with time. The German label Bureau B has reissued many of Roedelius’ early records, including the first volumes in the Selbstportrait series — amazing stuff.

Lunz
One of the more curious, but not totally unexpected, developments in the evolution of Krautrock and Kosmische Musik is how many of the movement’s original proponents now create what can only be tagged “new age music.” The Lunz project is a collaboration featuring Hans-Joachim Roedelius and keyboardist and Windham Hill alumnus Tim Story. The pair have dropped a string of albums since 2000, all of them documenting their delicate and muted take on modern ambient music. Despite the new age vibes, not all this music is “feel good.” The 2008 record Inlandish, for example, is marked by a kind of existential barrenness.

Tim Hecker
Tim Hecker’s music has been called a lot of things over the last decade. Drone, ambient, noise and microsound are just a few of them. But when you spend time with a record like Ravedeath, 1972, released earlier this year, the composer’s connections to classic Kosmische Musik make themselves as plain as the Milky Way on a brilliantly clear night in the Smoky Mountains. Hecker, much like Cluster, is a true synthesist, one who possesses an uncanny knack for blending electronic and acoustic sound sources. This, in turn, leads to an exquisite fusion of inner and outer space.

This is the last installment of “MtnHoppin’” the twice-a-month beer column I wrote for Asheville’s Mountain Xpress. Unfortunately, the piece went unpublished. A big thank you to scholar, writer and teacher Erik Davis for sharing his knowledge of the back-to-earth movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

I overheard some real funny talk, recently. It was Friday night during The Monk’s Thirsty Week blowout earlier this month. Parked at the front of the bar, next to the blanket-wrapped cask, my wife and I had each ordered a saison — the Stillwater Stateside and The Bruery Seven Grain, to be specific — when a gaggle of young men pulled up beside us. They were just-out-college types climbing The Ladder: handsome, confident, garrulous and wallpapered in Abercrombie & Fitch. iPhones and vaguely earthy suede footwear were also present.

These dudes were rookie tourists. And like most first-time visitors to our fare city, they couldn’t stop yapping about the freak scene in the Pritchard Park. You know, the drum circle.

Their astonishment quickly turned to mockery — typical hippie jokes about trustafarians, the Deadhead dance, arm-pit muff, etc. None it was particularly novel. But this is what struck me: how the profound irony of their situation — the fact that they were knocking back fine American craft beers while simultaneously dissing hippies — never seemed to dawn on them. Then it hit me. These well-kempt whippersnappers possessed zero sense of history. They had no clue that the ancestors of those wildly ecstatic hula-hoopers across the street from us are the very beardos who made the widespread enjoyment of killer brews a fact of modern American living.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m no craft-beer veteran bemoaning “kids these days.” But times have changed. Craft beer is currently in the throes of an incredible boom. With sales climbing taller and taller peaks, its image has shifted oh so slyly from crunchy to sexy. And as with any subculture that builds enough momentum to eventually pierce society’s mainstream, its newer, younger acolytes are ignorant of its hippie roots, ones that reach all the way back to the hairy homebrewing scene centered in-and-around California in the late-1960s and ’70s.

Along with permaculture and alternative shelter design, mountain biking and hot-tubbing, country-rock and progressive bluegrass, homebrewing expressed the Golden State’s back-to-earth revolution. “Many [hippies] turned their formerly political desires toward more modest dreams of self-sustainable life,” Erik Davis recently explained via e-mail. Scholar, author and host of Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network, Davis has written two books, Techgnosis and The Visionary State, both of which are mandatory reads, if counter-cultural history is your bag.

He went on to write: “Their Bible was the Whole Earth Catalog, whose pages were packed with lore that equally embraced hand-printing presses, manual wood lathes, and new media technology, and was moreover devoted to the do-it-yourself notion of making useful information available to pioneers of all stripes. This spirit of ingenuity, of creative hedonism, of craftsman values, and the community-building possibilities of spreading know-how — information that was both traditional and increasingly innovative — went into the creation of West Coast craft beer.”

That phrase — “both traditional and increasingly innovative” — sums up the double-helix nestled inside the craft-beer movement’s nucleus. Brewing is, indeed, an ancient and often rustic practice. At the same time, the communal methods of production and distribution employed by old-school hippie brewers mirrored, as Davis pointed out, the decentralized open-source theories explored by (among others) the early computer programmers, also living in California at that time.

In short, all these wonderfully experimental endeavors were like tendrils emanating from a single cultural zeitgeist.

A wonderful essay fleshing out these ideas is “The Revival,” written by Charlie Papazian, current President of the Brewers Association. Papazian has long resided in The West’s other classic hub for homebrewing hippies, Boulder, Colorado, where he self-published one of the first how-to-brew books embodying the open-source approach, 1976’s Joy of Brewing. Banged-out on an actual typewriter, the gnarly 40-page read was like a cross between an underground bohemian newspaper and a punk-rock zine.

By the early 1980s, shortly after President Jimmy Carter legalized homebrewing, the hippies and all their hard work started spawning America’s first modern micro- and craft-breweries, place like New Albion Brewing, Sierra Nevada, Samuel Adams, Bell’s Brewery, et al.

This, of course, is an all-too brief historical survey. But the lesson to be learned is one of edification. Next time you’re at The Thirsty Monk (or any other establishment near Pritchard Park hawking craft beers), and you overhear some fancy-pants youngins slamming our tribal drummers and hula-hoopers, well then, you walk right up to them, and you tell them everything I’ve just told you. It’s the duty of the educated consumer.

And don’t forget the part about the hot tubs.

“MtnHoppin’” is a twice-a-month beer column I write for Asheville’s Mountain Xpress.

Waynesville’s Go Grocery Outlet isn’t the kind of regional business you’ll see profiled in the glossy pages of WNC Magazine. Appalachian Chic, this place is not. Tucked in a dying strip mall off Route 276, The Go is a descendant of the mid-century supermarket, a ragged intersection of fluorescent track lighting, scuffed white linoleum and flat-top freezers that must be as old as Hall and Oates. On the windows hang garish posters advertising brands that wrote the book on American mass consumption: Campbell’s, Heinz, Kraft.

This is where blue-collar Appalachia comes to purchase bargain-rate bulk goods hosed down in high-fructose corn syrup: monolithic boxes of cereal, school-lunch hamburger patties in unmarked cases, frozen sacks of crinkle-cut French fries and so on. Though a rack of ice-cream sheet cakes does tempt me to amend my grocery list, I’ve made the trek from Asheville for one thing and one thing only: suds. Last week my pal Scott told me this Go Grocery (our area is home to three others) sports a sweet selection.

You read correctly. A man capable of ordering artisan bottles of Belgian beer from Bruisin’ Ales is also a man willing to drive 30 minutes for cheap supermarket beer. But not just any cheap supermarket beer. Ever since Uncle Al bequeathed a good portion of his domestic beer-can collection to me in the late ’80s, I’ve held a fascination with America’s older regional breweries and failed mainstream concoctions. It’s at discount outlets like The Go, which hawks more than its fair share of obscure food products, that such oddball booty can be found. A lot of it tastes like shit, of course. But flavor isn’t the point. These beers are a part of pop culture. They’re Americana.

I’m not the only dork who engages in this pastime. Interest in these types of beers has grown in recent years. The hipster-fueled resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon has opened-up a retro/nostalgia market for vintage working-man brews. As a result, brands such as Yuengling, Genesee, Straub and Narragansett have cleverly re-framed themselves as delicacies from our country’s industrial golden age.

The Go’s cooler is, indeed, interesting. Sloppy, too. Tidiness isn’t a high priority around here, it seems. The border at which the beer and dairy meet is a zigzag of unintentional cross-merchandising. About two feet to the right, a bag of salad mix and several stray pudding cups have been deposited atop a 12-pack of SouthPaw Light (a member of Miller’s Plank Road Brewery Family).

I grip two items almost immediately: a $3.99 sixer of Utica Club (“First beer sold in the United States after prohibition,” proclaims the label) and a $6.69 half-case of Game Day Light. Much like Yuengling, which has quite the following in Asheville, the former is a proletarian American lager first brewed in 1888. It’s owned by New York’s F.X. Matt Brewing Company. They also produce Saranac, a premium line good enough to have been featured on The Thirsty Monk’s weekly pint night in February of this year. Writer William Orten Carlton once described Utica Club as a quality “lawnmower beer.”

Game Day Light, in contrast, can’t boast U.C.’s heritage. Yet it’s a real curio, nonetheless. Along with Game Day Ice, it constitutes 7-Eleven’s recent venture into private-label beer. But despite the convenience store’s near omnipresence on the American landscape, G.D.L. isn’t easy to track down, a queer factoid that makes buying it only that much more necessary.

Before calling it a day, I also spy six-packs of Highland’s Gaelic Ale and bottles of New Belgium Brewing’s Fat Tire amber ale. These stick out for sure. Just a decade ago they, nor anything approaching their caliber, wouldn’t have been found in a place like this.

Upon reaching the check-out I ask my clerk, a well-tanned woman bespectacled in gold, what their most popular beers are. Expecting her to rattle off a list of Bud and Miller products, she surprises me. “That’s all people used to buy, because that’s all there was,” she drawls. “But now there’s more variety. People like the German beers. And the exotic ones, too. And what’s that one? Fat Tire? People love that.”

“So let met get this straight,” I think to myself as I head back to the car. “While suburban-bred hipster types are busy guzzling the working-class beers of yore, the present-day working class of this country is gradually developing a taste for craft beer?”

Oh, the irony.

“MtnHoppin’” is a twice-a-month beer column I write for Asheville’s Mountain Xpress. This piece is an Xpress blog-only addendum to “MtnHoppin’: American Craft Beer’s Lack of Session Obsession.”

If you’re checking-out this post, then you’ve probably read my recent “MtnHoppin’” column on the growing session-beer insurgency. If not, check it out now. Without regurgitating too much of what I’ve already written on the subject, below are my five favorite local brews that can be rightfully called session beers. Now, when defining the “session” concept I employed the guidelines recently established by longtime beer journalist Lew Bryson.

1) 4.5 percent alcohol by volume or less.
2) Flavorful enough to be interesting.
3) Balanced enough for multiple pints.
4) Conducive to conversation.
5) Reasonably priced.

There are more than a few beer fanatics, as well as industry-types, who are right now reading this and bristling at guideline no. 1. Way too low, they firmly believe; the ceiling for alcohol by volume (ABV) should be 5.0 percent, not 4.5. That is, in fact, the more popular number when defining session beer. However, at a time when inflated ABV-levels are all the rage in the craft-beer industry, I’ve noticed that ceiling has become taller and taller. Over the last month I’ve had two beers with ABV-levels of 5.4 and 5.5, respectively; both times my servers described them as session. So yeah, it’s best if we err on the side of caution these days.

Beer: Battery Hill
ABV: 4.2%
Style: English-style rye ale
Brewery: Craggie Brewing Company
Note: Craggie, in my humble opinion, oh so slightly beats-out Asheville Brewing Company as the local brewery most committed to offering variety and selection when it comes to session beers.

Beer: Belgian White Ale
ABV: 4.3%
Style: duh
Brewery: Lexington Ave. Brewery (LAB)

Beer: Rocket Girl
ABV: 3.2%
Style: American lager
Brewery: Asheville Brewing Company

Beer: Black Mountain Bitter
ABV: 4%
Style: Organic pale ale
Brewery: Highland Brewing Company
Note: A winter seasonal, which is kind of a bummer. I could rock this year round, easy. When served from cask it exemplifies the original British definition of session beer more than any other brew produced in the region. BTW, don’t let that word “bitter” scare you; it’s just a crusty, old English way of saying “pale ale.”

Beer: Toubab Brewe
ABV: 4.2%
Style: Bavarian-style Zwickel beer
Brewery: Craggie Brewing Company

Honorable Mention:
Beer: Swannanoa Sunset
ABV: 4.2%
Style: German-style Keller beer
Brewery: Craggie Brewing Company

Beer: Moonstone Stout
ABV: 4.5%
Style: Duh
Brewery: OysterHouse Brewing Company
Note: OysterHouse lists the ABV at “around 4.5%.” A little vague, sure. But the Moonstone deserves some love as the only stout in the region that meets Bryson’s guidelines. Then again, I could be totally wrong about that—I’m a drinker, not a respectable journalist.

So Very Close and So Very Good:
Beer: Re-Session Ale
ABV: 4.7%
Style: Cream ale
Brewery: French Broad Brewery

“MtnHoppin’” is a twice-a-month beer column I write for Asheville’s Mountain Xpress. I wrote a Xpress blog-only addendum to this piece titled “MtnHoppin’: Five Local Brews That Make Killer Session Beers.”

Though I’ve acquired the beer snob’s palette, my drinking habits will forever remain rooted in my Rust Belt past.

Where I grew up — a dying industrial town in Central New York that records more snowfall annually than Anchorage, Alaska — we don’t sip, swish, sniff or sample. We drink. The neighborhood bar, of which there are many, is as vital to the community as the confessional. It’s a second home, where all manner of Exleyian lunkheads spend several nights a week smothering tabletops full of empty pint glasses while talking, often loudly, about anything and everything under a sun that’s most definitely hidden behind an impenetrable blanket of clouds.

When I started dabbling in American microbrews in the ’90s there were numerous beers — usually British-style ales or pale lagers with alcohol-by-volume levels more or less on par with Budweiser’s five percent — appropriate for this grand tradition.

Over the last decade, however, that has changed. The industry, for a variety of reasons, fell in love with the “extreme beer,” and with that, ABV and flavor have been pushed to ungodly intensities. I love a good double IPA or Belgian style tripel on occasion. But what I’ve learned (the messy way, mind you) is that these roid-raging brews are way too powerful for the marathon barroom chats that form the cornerstone of my drinking heritage.

I want to converse jovially, not mutter incoherently.

Nowadays, the problem is that domestic craft-beer choices for lower-ABV beers are well, meh. Even here, in Beer City U.S.A., where we pride ourselves on abundance and diversity, most of our breweries and beer bars tend to skew towards the extreme. There are exceptions, of course (some of which I’ve posted to the Xpress website). But ultimately, if you’re craving a quality local brew in the ABV range of four to five-percent, then your options are a tad limited.

Voices have begun to emerge on the national scene, calling attention to the industry’s current lack of low-ABV variety. One of the more strident is a Boston brewer, writer and blogger by the name of Chris Lohring, former co-owner of the Tremont Brewery, but more recently, founder of the upstart Notch American Session Ale. “Craft beer has moved in a direction that isn’t really relevant to me,” he explains via telephone. “I’m not interested in having higher-ABV ‘hop bombs.’ Yet there aren’t many lower-ABV options out there. The only ones I can find are imports for the most part. I want to support the local guy, but the local guy isn’t really giving me what I want.”

The more Lohring talks, the more I realize we’re cut from a similar cloth: a couple of brew geeks who just so happened to have spent more than a few wintry evenings hanging at the neighborhood bar with our pals. “I like to drink beer. I don’t like to sip it. And that’s why I now make session beer with Notch,” he says. “I don’t have to sip it out of a short pour. That’s fine for wine, but I’m not drinking my beer that way.”

“Session beer,” which Lohring stumped-for in an op-ed column that appeared in the April issue of BeerAdvocate, is a phrase you’re probably going to be hearing more of in the future. It is “a British Invention, referring to any style of beer meant to fuel the tongue for hours of chatting and general camaraderie,” according to Christina Perozzi and Hallie Beaune in The Naked Pint.

In an attempt to modernize the traditional definition of session beer, Lohring’s Notch brewery has adopted standards recently established by veteran beer scribe Lew Bryson, who helms, among other blogs, The Session Beer Project: “4.5 percent alcohol by volume or less, flavorful enough to be interesting, balanced enough for multiple pints, conducive to conversation, reasonably priced.”

In their respective writings, both Lohring and Bryson have consistently stressed that they do not stand in opposition to the extreme-beer trend; they simply want to see more American craft-breweries offer greater variety when it comes to session beers. It’s a vital point. Variety is, indeed, one of the values comprising the core of our country’s craft-beer revolution.

And yet, I can’t help but think this session/extreme split could turn into a larger cultural, as well as philosophical, debate within the movement, one pitting the drinkers against the sippers. In a town currently dominated by the “hop bomb,” it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

“MtnHoppin’” is a twice-a-month beer column I write for Asheville’s Mountain Xpress.

In terms of visual appeal, the Wedge’s brewing system — best viewed when standing in front of the tasting-room taps while turning your head roughly 45 degrees to the left — is my fave in town.

The labyrinthine system of gleaming copper and crisp steel exudes a mix of the fantastical and the industrial. It’s a look that calls to mind the late-19th-century classics of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne: The Time Machine, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, War of the Worlds and, of course, A Journey to the Center of the Earth. At any given moment, you half-expect the entire building to start spewing steam, turn perpendicular to the ground and, with the late John Payne’s richly gnarled metalwork for a drill bit, burrow a gaping hole straight to the planet’s core.

The beers produced within this hermetic complex embody their origins. From the obscenely popular Iron Rail IPA, to the well-measured Julian Price Pilsner, Wedge beers are sturdy testaments to design and engineering. Ineffable subtlety isn’t their point — expertly modulated potency is.

I met Wedge Brewmaster Carl Melissas only recently. As a fairly regular patron, I caught glimpses of him operating his fin de siècle machinery. Over time, and a great number of pints, my imagination transformed this total stranger, wiry and goateed, into a character torn from the pages of one of the books mentioned above: a stoic and intense engine-room steward, forever monitoring his arcane equipment, or possibly an eccentric chemist who profoundly believes the mystical can be achieved via the rigors of scientific method.

Gradually, I realized this fiction I concocted wasn’t just fanciful — it was borderline crazy. In order to re-tether my noggin to the here and now, I required verification one way or another. I decided to meet the man himself under the guise of a brewery tour. Getting a look-see at the Wedge’s brewing process would be awesome, sure. But to meet Melissas and discover who he truly is would be even better. He didn’t disappoint.

To begin with, he’s not some oddball caricature. He’s down-to-earth, affable, intelligent and terribly unique. He’s my kind of brewmaster, one who isn’t afraid to engage in the lofty and philosophical. He’s also more than happy to flesh out the mechanics of his grand chemistry — decoction mashing, cooking wheat, conical fermenters, yeast generations and so on. But what ultimately kick-starts Melissas’ imagination is when all that nuts-and-bolts jargon is allowed to turn abstract and impressionistic, freely mingling with larger cultural issues. After all, this is a man whose license plate reads “BREWNART.”

Even when I babble about the “Victorian-era sci-fi aesthetic” of the titanic apparatus surrounding us, he keeps apace, describing the mash tun and kettle at his former brewery as giant “diving bells,” complete with glass portals. Pure Jules Verne, I think to myself.

Melissas’ theoretical musings on the brewing process are particularly stimulating and jibe with the engineered feel of his brews. While crouching next to a bucket of bubbling something or other (sanitizer, I believe), he details the myriad distinctions between “imitation” and “replication,” before calling himself a “glorified janitor.” Assistant brewer Dave Misson interjects (jokingly) that his boss suffers from OCD. Melissas smiles and concurs, saying that he aligns his über-meticulous approach with the brewing traditions of Germany, the same details-oriented kultur that gave us the BMW.

Probably the coolest thing about the Wedge is how Melissas’ views don’t stray far from the actual business of selling beer exclusively around here. At a time when craft-beer sales climb month after month, the temptation for owner Tim Schaller to start pumping out the brews must be great, to say the absolute least.

Yet the brewery, increasingly popular since opening in 2008, isn’t at all down with hawking more beer than Melissas’ extremely diligent methods can handle. That’s because the guy’s all-too bohemian personality is the double helix floating imperceptibly in every one of his brews; you change how the brewmaster works, you change the beer.

Of course, the Wedge has, as Melissas points out, a knack for driving local bars and restaurants a little batty with their limited production and somewhat unpredictable operation.

But hey, there’s no getting in between Captain Nemo and his submarine — however eccentric.

This is the debut installment of my new beer column for Asheville’s Mountain Xpress. “MtnHoppin’” is scheduled to run twice a month.

Picking these hops is kicking my ass. It’s barely noon, and already I’m yearning for a cold one and a little James Gang on the stereo. Sun and labor have transformed my body into a nexus of slime, stench and ache. And just look at those poor mitts: molasses-hued stains on fingertips, while itchy red-bumps — resembling a relief map of some heretofore undiscovered mountain range — circle both wrists.

For the inaugural installment of “Mountain Hopping” I had intended to pen a blurry-eyed dispatch from the tail end of a craft-beer binge across our fine region. Too gonzo cliche, I ultimately realized. Instead, I’m kicking things off with sobering experientiality: a sweat-soaked (half) day of helping grow and harvest a plant that has become, since sometime in Middle Ages, the most popular flavoring agent in the greatest of all alchemical practices (beer brewing).

Founded in 2005 by one Julie Jensen, who greeted me at the gates this morning in a “Don’t Worry, Be Hoppy” tee, Echoview is an audacious stab at a “sustainable” commercial farm, one specializing in four primary crops: in addition to hops, there are bees, bamboo and even solar energy. Hops, though, is big daddy. Having just hosted its First Annual Hops Festival on July 31, the farm is looking to become a major player in the region.

The property, just a few miles outside Weaverville town center, is a 70-plus acre spread, the layout of which Jensen likens to an outstretched hand. It’s home to eight varieties of hops, all of them in first-, second- and third-year stages of development. Three to five years, explains Jensen, is required to produce a truly viable crop. Until then, it’s a costly slog through hardcore trial, error and correction.

Along with General Manager Ric Horst (whose Texas Ranger-like ruggedness is pure No Country for Old Men) and farmhands Ryan Wooton and Aaron West, I’m working a hop field that contains four rows of a popular variety called “cascade.” Each plant slithers up a 10-foot rope suspended from a cable. On many of the farms in Oregon and Washington machinery has replaced the act of hand picking the cones dotting the bines. But compared to the massive ventures out west, Echoview is a feisty, young upstart. We’re kicking it old school: from pungent plant to plastic cup to drying screen. Over and over and over.

As we pick — and pick some more — my temporary boss and coworkers school me in the ways of this scratchy little bastard: alphas, betas, rhizomes, moisture levels and so on. The crop, I learn, is beyond finicky. Without delving into any abstruse science, growing hops is no less laborious than the taming of the shrew. And as Horst is quick to point out, our region’s humidity and dizzying array of ravenous pests do not make the courtship any easier.

Everybody here at Echoview welcomes the daunting challenge. Their excitement stems in part from the wide-open nature of WNC’s hops economy. “The hops-farm movement in North Carolina is reminiscent of what was going on in the northwest 20 to 25 years ago,” says Chris Richards, Brewmaster over at French Broad Brewing. “Even though we’re still a few years away, everybody’s trying to create this microcosm of industry in terms of getting the hops directly from the farmers.”

Here’s the one humongous hurdle: our region is home to numerous farms mainly hawking their whole hops and/or wet hops to the homebrew scene. Yet none of them have the processing facilities needed to transform their crop into the creature of consistency commercial brewers like Richards crave: pellet hops.

Very few breweries in Beer City, USA, actually use regional hops in high-volume brewing. Instead, they purchase them from various pelletizing plants around the country, all of which are at least a day’s drive from Asheville. To ship their crop to these plants isn’t financially feasible for local growers. Hops spoil so easily that shipping time between farm and plant should really be no more than one to two hours.

To be both farmer and onsite processor is exactly the long game Echoview is playing, Horst reveals. And if their big-picture plan to produce a competitively priced pellet hop of quality succeeds somewhere down the road, it will only strengthen the regional craft-beer industry, making it a far more localized and self-reliant entity.

Jensen and her team totally understand the costs of such a top-shelf facility. In fact, they even seem energized by both the rewards and the risks.

It’s an energy that’s downright infectious. On the other hand — when’s lunch around here?

Until next time, may your foameth never overruneth.

This interview originally appeared on the Mountain Xpress’ arts & entertainment blog.

Over the last few years, the outer fringes of electronic music have birthed a new generation of musicians obsessed with vintage Krautrock, Kosmische Musik, proto-New Age atmospherics and old-school synth experimentation. We’re talking intrepid, young sound explorers hell bent on bringing the delicious ambient glory of Tangerine Dream, Cluster and Klaus Schulze into the 21st century.

Two of the movement’s most vital artists, Sam Goldberg and Emeralds, hail from the former home of that traitor LeBron James. There, with Cleveland’s sprawling industrial decay as their backdrop, they have crafted some of the most wonderfully hypnotic music of the past decade. Goldberg’s Current LP in particular feels like a real benchmark for this dazzling, new music.

Luckily, Asheville will get to sample Mr. Goldberg’s killer drone-work when his current tour (spotlighting his synth project Radio People) takes him to Harvest Records this Monday, July 19.

I recently talked with Goldberg. We covered a lot of ground, everything from his friendship with Emeralds, to his record label Pizza Night, to his all-time favorite ambient jams.

Check it out…

Farrar: I assume you grew-up cutting your teeth on punk, hardcore and indie rock.

Goldberg: Yes. Punk and indie rock were a staple of my youth, but not hardcore so much. I also grew up listening to The Grateful Dead, The Band and the Beatles, primarily through my folks. Once I got into punk I shunned that stuff, but eventually came back around to the “classics.” The Band and the Beatles have as much influence on my music as synth heavyweights like Klaus Schulze and Michael Stearns.

How did you transition into ambient and drone electronics?

My transition came from the playful psych-zones of indie rock and the Beatles-inspired stuff, which then led to stoner rock, drone and beyond. The last pop band I had sounded similar to Guided by Voices and Gris Gris. But because I was getting into noisier psychedelic music, as well as Krautrock, I wanted to create sounds that were more “out there.”

Did this realization happen over a period of time, or was it a kind of epiphany?

I started listening to Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream around the time I moved back to Cleveland after a short stint in Chicago, where I went to film school — an epic failure. I met Emeralds in the basement of the now-defunct Church [a local performance space]. They turned me on to even more jams. They also egged me on to get off the sidelines and record — I was just booking a lot of noise shows. I decided to use an organ and a delay pedal to make my first tape, which I recorded down in basement of [Emeralds’] Mark McGuire.

For someone familiar only with your recorded output, how does it compare to your live show?

On this tour I’m doing Radio People, which is my synth project. It very much comes from my love of the more proggy sounds of later Krautrock and synth music.

Performing live, however, became a bore for me about a year ago. I burned-out on my guitar and reverb set-up. I love that style, because of its simplicity. Current can be played from beginning to end using that set up. And I did that quite a bit. But I wanted to do “more” rather than the slow dreary stuff that Current embodies. It tends to put crowds that aren’t normally into my kind of music to sleep. I just finished a new album, on which I’m accompanied by sax, drums, clarinet, etc. I would like to bring an ensemble like that on the road. It’s the next logical step beyond Current. But for now I continue to play solo.

What’s your current set-up in terms of equipment and instrumentation?

My Korg Polysix and a Casio organ-and-drum machine combo. It’s connected to my style in Mist, my project with John Elliot of Emeralds. After playing synth in Mist I realized I wanted to continue using synthesizers in my solo performances. My Radio People style came from that.

I do think you share with Emeralds a love for the sublime. Both of you seem willing to move beyond the love of distortion and feedback common in underground noise.

My Sam Goldberg material and Radio People project are two very different things. I do feel that way about my own solo material. It’s based on a certain sound that I hope to expand over time — more about finding the music that is in my head and heart. Though it’s drone based, I’m starting to use more acoustic instruments, rather than blaring-reverb guitar. Radio People is more of a conceptual project. The goal is to create something that is a bit more cinematic. It’s about a picture in my head, rather than a feeling.

Would you say your music is experimental? Or do you approach music more like a composer writing a song?

Songwriting for sure.

You release both limited-edition cassettes and finely packaged vinyl. Do you prefer one to the other, or do both media have distinct advantages and charms?

Vinyl. I want to do more records, of course, but my cassettes serve a different purpose. I enjoy following artists in between their major releases myself, so I like to drop tapes to keep people up on my music. At this point, it’s the only way—other than relatively short run LPs—to do this.

Does the medium ever dictate the music? For example, it seems as if the recordings on Current (Weird Forest Records, 2009) are very much intended for vinyl.

Actually, Side A of Current appeared on tape and wasn’t intended for vinyl. But I realized they were pinnacle tracks from my early work and really embodied that zone for me.

Can you tell me about any upcoming projects and/or releases?

A Radio People self-titled LP is due out next week on Digitalis. Only 300 copies, but I think it will be available online. It’s made up of my favorite tracks from the first 3 tapes that I did with the project. After that, the new Sam Goldberg LP on the Arbor label coming early next year — I’m really excited for that as well.

Now on to the most important question of our interview! What kind of cool tour merch do you plan to unleash on Asheville?

Lots of new Pizza Night releases, a Radio People tour tape and hopefully my record!

Just one more: if you were to run into some little punker-dude who wanted to expose his/her noggin to classic Krautrock, Kosmische Musik and ambient jams, what three albums would you recommend?

La Düsseldorf: Viva
Walter Carlos: Sonic Seasonings
Ashra: New Age of Earth

Those are the three I go back to all the time.

This feature article originally appeared in Asheville, North Carolina’s Mountain Xpress.

Pocahaunted’s new album, Make It Real, needs to be cranked the way one would a killer dub joint, say Keith Hudson’s Nuh Skin Up Dub or Wackie’s Natures Dub:

Overdrive the bass, kill the treble.

For those unfamiliar with the splendor that is mind-rattling bass, this sounds excessive, I’m sure. Basically, you want the low-end — Diva Dompe’s bass and the gooey organ of Cameron Stallones (who has since been replaced by Leyna Noel) — so loud it blossoms into a massive, rumbling vortex, around which every other sound/instrument is forced to orbit. This includes all manner of wobbly percussive clatter, skronk-sax, the six-string’s metronomic melodicism and, of course, Amanda Brown’s patent arsenal of echo-laden shrieks, yelps, moans, groans and howls.

“Before [Make It Real], none of us had ever thought about being in a band with really prominent bass,” says Brown, talking via cell from her pad in L.A. (the Eagle Rock ‘hood to be specific). “In both indie and drone, you don’t really think about the bass. The bottom isn’t always the most important thing. If we wrote parts that we couldn’t dance to, then we ditched them. If we couldn’t feel that vibe, then we stopped the part. So this is us being dance-y. This is what outsiders do when making dance music.”

Pocahaunted hasn’t been a full ensemble for too long. Likewise, they didn’t always make, as Brown likes to define it, “outsider funk.” The group’s only constants, since its earliest cassettes and CD-Rs began seeping into underground noise and rock circles in 2006, are Brown and her myriad vocal manipulations. Back then the group consisted of just her and pal Bethany Cosentino. The duo, like a lot of young freakers wandering the outer fringes of sound over the last five to six years, began tinkering with extended, free-form-psychedelic drones: blurry, tribal-tinged incantations lovingly guarded in a nest of crackling feedback and distortion.

It was fun for a while, Brown admits, producing a clutch of transcendent recordings. But as she points out, the world of drone and noise, which is overrun almost exclusively with dudes obsessed with free improv and trippy head noise, is no long-term domicile for a woman who also harbors a love for funk, dub, afrobeat and monolithic bass that get asses moving.

An early harbinger of dissatisfaction came in the form of 2008′s Island Diamonds, which consists of four extended tracks (all of them ripe for remixes). It wouldn’t be inaccurate to frame the record as “Nyabingi noise twee” or some other cheeky-music-nerd phrase. It’s still in the “drone zone,” as my friend Bent Crayon jokingly calls it, but creeping into the murk’s lower strata are dubby dance grooves Brown and Cosentino dipped in boiling water and twisted into a host of delicious shapes.

Brown, as a matter of fact, wasn’t the only one growing restless. An incorrigible fan of the Beach Boys, the Ronettes and even Billy Joel, Cosentino relocated to New York City in autumn 2008. Re-christening herself Best Coast, she embraced her love of pure pop and has since garnered serious, uh, “indie buzz” for her hook-stained, lo-fi ear candy (think Wavves, Ariel Pink, No Age).

“The band basically ended,” says Brown. “It took me a while to figure out what to do with the Pocahaunted name. So I asked the most elite friends I had to come together and start writing weird funk songs. It took a long time to get a new sound. We didn’t release anything for a while. We just wrote, practiced and played shows.”

Make It Real, released in March on Not Not Fun, the label she runs with her husband and bandmate Britt, is the end result of Brown’s self-imposed cocoon stage. But unlike Cosentino’s Best Coast project, Pocahaunted 2.0 isn’t a resolute dismissal of the group’s drone past, more like a subtle negotiation. It’s a fantastic summertime soundtrack: catchy, quirky and fun. Plus, the production, an unwieldy wash of reverb, gels smoothly with humid nights and sticky tees.

Comparisons to the Slits are tempting, but the group’s reckless moxie actually reminds me of Calvin Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Sound System, who preached the gospel of dub to indie brats back in the mid 1990s; only Johnson never had a bassist as commanding as Dompe. Inventive patterns, fluid runs — she also lumbers like a woolly mammoth stoned on Percocet.

Not everything is snap-focus groove research, however. Eight-plus minutes of brutal mutant beauty, the track “UFO” (A nod to ESG?) swims in an avant-garde ecstasy reminiscent of old-school Pocahaunted. With Dompe maintaining the center, voice, organ, drums, sax and guitar drift out to sea, losing sight of shore and absolutely loving it. On “UFO” (and to a lesser extent “You Do Voo Doo”) the outsider-to-funk ratio definitely swings in favor of the former.

Nearing the end of our talk, Brown talks about the ways in which Pocahaunted’s new sound has affected its fan base. Though crowd reception isn’t something she’s terribly concerned with, Brown chews on it from time to time. As she sees it, they’re currently trudging across the “muddy middle;” Make It Real is too dance-oriented for the noise/drone scene the group is gradually leaving behind, yet still too weird, sonically, for the indie-rock crowd. Recently, they opened for Vampire Weekend, with whom they share a love for afro-pop and afrobeat. The band’s knack for making its young fans boogie blew her away, yet Brown ultimately believes, “We’re not ever going to be grouped in with them, because they’re so bouncy and clean.”

I wholeheartedly concur. Not in a million years would a Vampire Weekend album ever inspire me to overdrive the bass and kill the treble. Those settings are reserved for heavy “riddims” only — like Make It Real.

This concert review originally appeared on the Mountain Xpress’ arts & entertainment blog.

At exactly 2:47 a.m. on Sunday, March 28, the speakers fell silent. Martyn, who’d been onstage for the last two hours, maybe a tad longer, stepped back from the “decks,” took a massive pull from his bottled water and looked out at a totally desolate Club 828. There were six of us, actually, not counting staff and the stragglers who spent most of their time smoking outside. Occasionally, one popped in to check out Martyn’s set, but only very briefly. As for real diehards, it was just the six of us, and we danced and clapped and whooped and cheered, because we had just experienced one the world’s top DJs and producers. You have to give Martyn (born Martijn Deykers) credit: the guy was utterly unaffected by the dismal showing. As we approached the stage, he came over and seemed genuinely flattered that these six yahoos were freaking out for him. With a huge grin on his face, he shook all our hands and thanked us for enjoying the music as intensely as we did.

I have to admit: I was bumming on Asheville that night. You guys slept through a major music event! It’s beyond rare that a DJ and producer of Martyn’s international stature plays a North American city that’s not New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal or Chicago. Here’s an artist who has slayed the best clubs and festivals the world has to offer, including Fabric in London, Berghain in Berlin and Montreal’s mighty MUTEK festival. Speaking of Fabric, in January the Dutch native released a disc in the club’s prestigious mix series, which also contains killer sets from Robert Hood, Claude VonStroke, Steve Bug, Michael Mayer and more.

Martyn’s mix for Fabric, Fabric 50, is a good indication of what you missed. To begin with, he defies simple taxonomy, fusing together elements of dubstep, hyperstep, minimal techno, house, drum & bass, hip-hop, vintage new wave and even early-1980s club jams (everything from Prince to electro-funk). I, however, don’t mean to imply that Martyn is all about mashing disparate sounds together in some novel ode to manic eclecticism. Though he himself has said his mixes could be more streamlined, they are extremely well engineered and crafted, testaments to sound as architecture.

During his Club 828 set — which was, of course, awesome — thick, wavy basslines slid through scattershot percussion, jagged chords and the occasional vocal. Rhythms collapsed in on themselves, but not before giving birth to myriad permutations that would begin the lifecycle all over again. An endless stream of dubby squiggles and streaks emerged from the speakers, exploding, settling, melting, percolating, etc. Maybe because Martyn is both DJ and producer he’s capable of weaving together tracks on a seemingly microscopic level. Oftentimes, he’s more mathematician — furiously working out one of them mile-long equations — than DJ. At more than a few moments in his mix, Martyn hit a glorious peak when either you could’ve continued to dance or simply sat there stunned, marveling at the exquisite hypnotism swirling about your head. Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a club rat to dig Martyn; you just have to dig music that’s designed to blur the senses through rhythm, groove and drone. This is arty stuff, no doubt about it.

In terms of sound, the only beef I had was with Club 828’s sound system. It’s meaty and powerful for sure, perfect for gut-rupturing hip-hop. Yet it does lack the definition and sharp focus required of techno and house music’s edgier incarnations. But hey, that pales in comparison to the fact that Martyn made it to our little mountain town Saturday night (and early Sunday morning). Major props to Club 828 for pulling off such a coup. And if such a killer event comes our way again, you better not miss it, Asheville. I know for a fact there are folks out there who would’ve had their minds blown by the great Martyn.