FOOGMESS

FOOGMESS is happening again! 

This is a smaller cheaper but equally as awesome alternative festival to MoogFest. There is a good mix of local and touring bands and they all sound really awesome. There's no age limit but no underage drinking (of course). There is a suggested donation of $2-5. Costumes are welcome and suggested for Monday evening. I hope everyone comes out to enjoy this great event!

ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA 

October 28, 29, 30, 31 

FRIDAY OCTOBER 28th: @ BANDWAGON (474 Haywood Road) 

8:00 PM 

-Nest Egg 

 -Aswara 

-Difference Clouds 

-Housefire 

-Merryl 

SATURDAY OCTOBER 29th: @ IZZY'S (74 N. Lexington Avenue) 

8:00 PM 

-Quiet Evenings 

-Xiphiidae 

-Sparkling Wide Pressure 

-Heat Sureens 

-Villages 

-Cumulus 

SUNDAY OCTOBER 30th: @ 22 BROAD ST. 

(DAY SHOW; 2:00 PM) 

-Giant Giants 

-Plaens 

-Brian Kincaid 

-Abe Leonard 

-Slow Loris 

MONDAY HALLOWEEN (!!!!): @ BANDWAGON (474 Haywood Road) 

9:00 PM 

-Skeleton Warrior 

-Meager Sunlight 

-White Creeps 

-By Any Means Necessary
-Virgin Pulp 

 *schedule is subject to change

Asheville: My New(ish) Post

So I have been living in Asheville, NC for a little while now, doing the whole post college graduation lifestyle thing of working in the service industry, spending lots of time outside, doing things that make me happy, and living with awesome people. This town has been a great place for all of those things to fully manifest. One really great thing about my new dwelling place is the wonderful enthusiasm for music that is so potent in the community. So many of my friends are musicians or are nearly as obsessed with this form of expression as I am.

Shows of varying sorts happen nearly every night. From small intimate house shows to experimental gallery space shows and from classical orchestral concerts to rowdy punk shows, Asheville seems to nurture and produce them all.

image source

So being in this city I am going to reignite this blog and begin posting again. There will be some posts still just about music that I feel is inspiring and worth a good thorough analysis and also some post about local events and musicians.

The next few posts will probably be dealing with the festival(s) that are happening this upcoming weekend, the popular Moog Fest and the local underground counterpart, Foog Mest. There should be a lot of great shows happening so I'll try to cover some of the most outstanding of them.


For now though I will leave you with a song by the band Hello Hugo who played a great set last night at their cd release show at Bobo Gallery.

Live Music Alert!

S H O W F R I D A Y N I G H T !

There's going to be a good show this Friday at the Earl. The bands, Times New Viking, Reptar and Red Sea will all being performing!

These are all great bands. I have only listened to Times New Viking a bit, but I like what I have heard. Both Reptar and Red Sea are friends of mine and I sincerely appreciate and respect their music. They are unique bands, definitely on different sides of the indie spectrum. It all should make for a good mix of post-rock melodic music and electronic/pop influenced tunes

Hope to see you there!

Local Highlight: An Interview with Little Tybee

Brock Scott is the vocalist, guitarist and sort of creator of the local Atlanta band, Little Tybee. He has been creating music for years, formerly under the band name, Brock Scott Quartet. Beginning in Savannah and moving up to the big city his group has kicked off and is growing and evolving with each album to be one of the more unusual and interesting sounds emanating from the bars and venues of Atlanta and the East coast.

Today I sat down with Brock, Josh Martin, and Nirvana Kelly to get a deeper understanding of these musicians perspectives on music, why and what they create, and why it is such an important and influential form of Art and media in our society and culture.

We cover topics from Gucci Mane to the ecology of music. I also prefaced the podcast with one of my favorite tracks, History, off of their latest album entitled Humorous to Bees.

Enjoy!

Interview with Little Tybee by sehowerter

Laurie Anderson: Bringing Performance Art into Popular Music

If you think that Lady Gaga is the first at creating huge and lavish performances to accompany the "music" that she creates than think again. There is a rich history of performance art expressed through and assisting music, and that history, some might say, began with one woman.

Laurie Anderson is an American experimental performance artist and musician who got her start in the 1970's and emerged into the popular music scene in the early 1980's. She is known for her unusual style of creating music, her merging of performance art and music, and her invented instruments. I remember when I first heard her album, Big Science, specifically the song, O Superman. It seemed so unique and new, even though by that point it had already been around 30 years old.

Zero and One

This song/performance from 1984 is a part of her film, Home of the Brave. The performance as a whole features collaborations with William S. Burroughs and Peter Gabriel. It is extremely experimental, even as viewed in the 21st century and this song is the sort of introduction to it. At the beginning Laurie comes out masked and in a very strange and sort of minimal outfit, playing one of her invented instruments, the Tape Bow Violin. Emanating from the instrument are very odd noises as other masked individuals appear around her. She then proceeds into a sort of lecture about the numbers zero and one. This is definitely more than a music video or an emotional experience. There is a message that Laurie is trying to get across, which in this case she is basically preaching to the audience but in other cases are more encrypted. She is an artist that is breaking the comfort boundaries of what we think of as music and inserting pretty much whatever she wants into it.

Music as Rebellion

Every once in a while you happen upon a story that reassures your faith in something. Often I need these reassurances about Art, and this is a case of one...

The artist known as, Bombino is a Tuareg guitarist from Agadez, Niger. He grew up and has lived through two Tuareg rebellions. The first, during his birth, and second, after he began playing as a professional musician. But the government in attempt to hinder the rebellion, banned guitars from the Tuareg because they were seen as a symbol of revolt. Two of Bombino's fellow musicians were executed for the act, which drew him into exile. Filmmaker, Ron Wyman, heard a cassette of Bombino while traveling through the area, decided to track him down, and helped him produce an album. Since then, a full film has been created to tell his story and Bombino has been able to return and is now revered as a musician of the rebellion, playing for thousands of people and existing as a symbol and representation of peace, equal rights, and their rich, cultural heritage.

Good Luck

Folk Punk is a genre merging the composition (and often the attitude) of punk music, with the personal, down home feelings and instrumentation of folk music. There is the sense of community embedded in folk punk music, often including multiple people singing, shanty style, and instigating everyone else around to join in on the tune.

I learned about the Bloomington, IN

based band, Good Luck, from a couple of my Floridian best friends. While living with them we would often, while hanging out at home or driving out to the beach, turn on a Good Luck song at full volume and lose ourselves, shouting along with the lyrics and jumping around. For some reason, acoustic guitars and untrained singing voices sound very nostalgic and comfortable to me even if I've never heard the song before. Maybe it's because it sounds raw or like it could have, or might have, been created around a camp fire (or in a library). In any case, it is often these simple sounding songs that contain poignant and strong messages in them. I think this one is a good example...

AESTHETICS

Gook Luck is a band somewhere between the Folk and Pop Punk genres. The music is often pretty Pop based with the repetitive and catchy structure, but the singing style and the lyrics seem more imbued with punk and folk themes. This song is off of their album Into Lake Griffy, which they released in 2008. It is the first track off the record and I think performs as a wonderful introduction into their songs and the type of messages that they are trying to put across in them.

CONTENT

As with the rest of the political songs that I have posted about, the meat of it all really lies in the lyrics. This song is no exception. The lyrics and simple, poetic and perceptive. Somewhat existential at times, they talk about the human condition. Why are we here and what are we supposed to be doing with our time? It is less political and more about relationships in general, not just romantic. We're here on Earth and we're bound to bump up against other people that often become the things that sculpt and change us the most.

Here we are in this world.

I don't know how we got here, but somehow we learned how to live here.
Now our brains are too big for our heads. They're expanding.
You can order your life through meticulous planning,
but it's a crapshoot
when things unexpectedly start to move faster.
And you try to avert a disaster.
But you can't always get what you're after.
I know you know this.

We all want to feel content,
but we need more than a place to shit and to lay a bed.
If sometimes living doesn't terrify you, if love doesn't pulverize you, then where are you at?
Where's the power in that?
Though it's been nothing but complicated
since the first time that two people dated,
and your heart makes you deathly afraid,
it's all you've got.

Is it impossible, friend?
Is it only a dream to find truth in the visions you see?
Or to believe the love that I'm waiting for is somewhere waiting for me?
Well maybe the way to get what you want
is to stop waiting for it to show up.
Have faith in the wind and the rain it will come (but only if you let it come).

Yeah, everyone feels alone.
Maybe more, maybe less, maybe this year or next or when they grow old.
But what a bogus affliction!
It's the human condition. We all want affection
and the sound of another heartbeat.

Maybe when this ends and the stars all call down for me
it'll finally make sense, or just as likely still be mystery.
I don't know where you are my friend,
I don't know if I'll ever know.
But maybe you'll be there when it's time to go.