After opening for Modest Mouse earlier this month, Survival Knife plays with Hungry Ghost at Bunk Bar. Show at 9.
$8 advance, $10 at the door.
More info at http://www.bunksandwiches.com/shows/
After two demo releases in the late 90s the band released three full-length albums: “Pale Folklore” (1999), “The Mantle” (2002), and “Ashes Against the Grain” (2006). “The Mantle” has since been heralded as a classic for having been one of the first albums to combine elements from black metal, neo-folk, progressive rock, post-rock, and ambient music. The influence of this record can be seen in many so-called “post-black metal” bands today.
In 2008 Agalloch began re-releasing their demos, B-sides, and EPs under their own Dammerung Arthouse label. In 2010 their fourth album “Marrow of the Spirit” made number one on numerous critic’s top ten lists. In between each of these full-lengths the band pushed on the flexible boundaries they had developed around themselves through a series of EPs that found the band experimenting with post-rock/instrumental rock (“The Grey,” 2004), neo-folk/psychedelic folk (“The White,” 2008) and most recently a mammoth twenty-minute epic work entitled “Faustian Echoes” (2012) released through Dammerung Arts.
Agalloch has earned a reputation for explosive and emotional live performances. They have sold out tours across Europe and the US and have played a variety of major festivals including: Roadburn, Inferno, and Scion among others. The band takes special care constructing the environment of each and every show with wood, incense, and imagery taken directly from their home in the Northwest. Such care makes an Agalloch show more than just a typical heavy metal concert.
LOOP was formed in Croydon, London, 1986 by Robert Hampson (vocals/
guitar) and partner Beki Stewart (Bex) on drums. After finding Glen Ray
on bass, through an advert in Melody Maker, they began to perform live
and were quickly signed to HEAD Records run by Jeff Barrett (Heavenly)
who released their feedback-drenched debut 12” 16 Dreams.
Following line-up changes – the arrival of new drummer John Wills, new
bassist Neil MacKay and James Endeacott on second guitar the band were
to take a more primal rhythmic foundation captured on their impressive
debut full-length Heavens End (1987).
The band managed to hypnotise all with their discordant trance-like
spell which served as an antidote to the prevailing trend in British pop
at the time – they resurrected the concept of loud out there-rock for a
new era, creating droning soundscapes of bleak beauty and harsh
dissonance, loosely influenced by bands such as The Velvet Underground,
The Stooges, The MC5, but retaining an avant-garde and experimental edge
from Can, Faust, Neu!, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca and minimalist
systems music, to name but a few. Live shows were revelatory, Loop,
allowing LOUD as a constant descriptive term, they pushed PAs to the
very edge of their existence, creating a sonic pummel not really
experienced since.
A collection of singles and B-sides, The World in Your Eyes, appeared on
HEAD in 1987 and after the departure of Endeacott the band signed to
the Chapter 22 label, releasing the Collision 12” as well their more
sparse and discordant second full-length, Fade Out.
GARDENS & VILLA
Gardens & Villa is the project of five college friends from Santa Barbara, formed following the collapse of a noisier post-punk band and a hitch-hiking journey up the west coast. Members Chris Lynch, Adam Rasmussen, Levi Hayden, Shane McKillop began playing in earnest as Gardens & Villa in 2008. The name is pulled from the location of their house on Villa Street, and the property’s lovely garden to which they tend. The music they make is very much connected to coastal city they call home — the stoney bike rides, dance parties, a scene free of judgment. The band refers to this Santa Barbara feeling as “coco vibes.” For two weeks in the summer of 2010, the band camped behind visionary and now-labelmate Richard Swift’s Oregon studio. No shower, no kitchen, but all the magic you could ask for. After taking a band oath to always play all parts live — a la Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense — the band added member Dusty Ineman to supremely execute the live incarnation of the band.
PURE BATHING CULTURE
It's a rare and beautiful thing when a band emerges fully formed, but it makes perfect sense in the case of guitarist Daniel Hindman and keyboardist Sarah Versprille's Pure Bathing Culture. Having backed folk rock revisionist Andy Cabic in Vetiver, the New Yorkers partnered up and moved West in 2011, settling in Portland, Oregon. Building off their past experiences as musical collaborators, in a short time the duo have created a sound that is undeniably their own: soaring synths, chiming keyboards, and shimmering electric guitars move in lockstep with bouncing drum machines. Sarah's crystalline voice floats on top of it all with divine purpose. It's a sound that looks back momentarily for inspiration — Talk Talk, Prefab Sprout, Cocteau Twins — but then fixes its gaze firmly on the present.
with Kirin J Callinan
Some musicians know where they're from and where they're going, and why. Others, such as Connan Mockasin, can only work from instinct, not only disinterested in the bigger picture as unable to see it. Take Mockasin's first album, Forever Dolphin Love, which he only wrote and recorded because his mother suggested it. Or his new album Caramel, triggered because he liked the onomatopoeic quality of the word, and the music and words just followed."To me, the word 'caramel' sounded so nice," Mockasin muses. "And as far as I know," Mockasin muses, "nobody had ever used the word for an album title."This helps explain the evolution from the labyrinthine, oddball-psych of Forever Dolphin Love to Caramel's equally inventive and unique brand of mutated, lustrous soul, almost wholly self-recorded over a month in a Tokyo hotel room.Mockasin remains what Clash Music called "a true cosmonaut of inner space" but the new album explores different regions of his galaxy, not just soul but a liquefied brew of blues, funk, ambient and folk with pronounced Oriental and Gallic timbres, all laced with an uncanny air of bliss.Oh, and it's a concept album. Of sorts. "The concept is that it's actually an album," says Mockasin. "It starts with the dolphin [from the debut album] leaving, and the boss (the man) who is so in with love with the dolphin is sad, and then it kicks into the new album, and he is happier. But there's a car race and a crash"In track terms, Mockasin's narrative starts with album intro 'Nothing Lasts Forever', shifts to 'Caramel' and later on, crash-emulating guitar shrieks that constitute part three of the five-part 'It's Your Body'. Part four, however, is all tranquil and Zen. "That was when I heard my friend was dying and I felt sad," Mockasin explains."It's just ideas in my head that I put together, and later on it might make more sense. But I don't think about the meaning at the time. Or I'm not aware of it."Mockasin is also unaware of the possibility that Caramel has hints of Scritti Politti's exquisitely stitched soul, or of Prince if the Minneapolis legend had spent time in Canterbury, the learned epicentre of South East England's progressive psychedelia during the late '60s and early '70s, where the likes of Syd Barrett and Kevin Ayers began their own musical journeys. "Prince goes to Canterbury, that's a good one!" Mockasin retorts. "Maybe Caramel is a little bitsoul. Maybe it comes a smidge more from hip hop, which to me sounds much fresher than what's called 'indie'. Sometimes I'm ashamed to be in a band, or a musician, at this point in time."Being a musician has always been a vexed issue for the man born Connan TantHosford in Te Awanga on the east coast of New Zealand's north island. Hearing his dad's Jimi Hendrix album set him on a course to play guitar, "to be the best in school," he recalls. "I was obsessed. But I went off music during high school, and I wanted nothing to do with guitar. I didn't even want to be noticed. Maybe that was puberty."Instead, the teenage Connan got a welder and built his own version of carnival rides and beach vehicles, and surfed, until high school was over, "and music came back." One of his formative bands was Grampa Moff (also a track title onForever Dolphin Love) but it was Connan And The Mockasins (named by a friend after Connan's hobby of making moccasins out of sheepskin and motorbike tyre) that first made a mark, when the quartet decided to try their luck in London in 2006. Without friends or contacts, they initially slept on park benches (luckily it was a great summer), but once settled, and with bar jobs, they found interests from record labels, but Connan backed out of an album deal. "All labels we met with began by saying we could record any way we liked, but then started saying, 'use this studio, with this producer'I could see where that was heading."Disillusioned with the record industry, and the limitations of a band set-up, Mockasin returned, alone, to New Zealand. "I decided to do nothing, or nothing to do with music. But my mum said I should just make a record. I didn't know how to record but we had a few tape machines lying around the house, so I did.I didn't expect to release it, just wanted to make a record I liked, for my ears and my mum's."With renewed passion, Mockasin retained the band name as his new surname because he liked the sound of "Connan Mockasin" and self-released his own mum-triggered album in 2010 as Please Turn Me Into the Snat.Mockasin returned to the UK before discovering that DJ/producer Erol Alkan had discovered the album and wanted to make the first release on his new Phantasy Sound label. The album was re-released, under the new title Forever Dolphin Love after its magnificently meandering ten-minute centrepiece.Ecstatic reviews followed, alongside live shows, where Mockasin would eschew set lists, "so that it felt new every time we play. The band has a couple of rehearsals to begin with, but we don't practise after that. I'd rather follow the mood of the audience playing the same songs in the same way, every night, would be so boring."Mockasin was about to record what became Caramel with his band when he rushed home when his father was suddenly taken ill. In the aftermath, he decided to retreat to Tokyo whose aura can be heard in tracks such as 'It's Your Body (Part Five)' and the chatter of young Japanese voices dotting the album, adding more levels of intrigue and imagination. "Too much of the music that I do get to hear, I find too aware, or processed," he says. "I just want to capture the first idea I have, which is always the most mysterious and attractive part."If Caramel wasn't enough, Mockasin has also been writing more material for Charlotte Gainsbourg after penning the exquisite 'Out Of Touch' for the actress/singer's 2012 mini-album Stage Whisper. Connan was already popular in France "it felt like they immediately understood what I was doing" and their ongoing collaboration will only endear him more to the French. It's another sign that Mockasin is going places, but at his own pace, just as Caramel suggests the process of melting and taking on a new shape, a new taste. That is the true sound of Connan Mockasin.
Cost: 13.00 to 15.00
Raz Simone
ZelooperZ
ORGNCS
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Roseland Theater 503-224-2038
8 NW 6th Ave, Portland, OR
8pm (doors open at 7pm). All Ages.
$17.00 advance tix from TicketsWest.
$20.00 at the door.
ABOUT DANNY BROWN--
Born Daniel Sewell on March 16, 1981, Danny Brown is a hip-hop artist from the Dexter-Linwood area of Detroit, Michigan.
Danny is an unconventional hip-hop artist who employs multiple flows and cadences, thus the moniker "The Hybrid". His style varies from low pitched gravelly tones to a manic, high-pitched squawk.
His lyrics often deal with the truth of living in Detroit: poverty, drug abuse, desperate circumstances, etc. and his own experiences in the motor city, from selling drugs to underground parties in Detroit's rave scene. He is known for juxtaposing those topics with a humorous narrative told ferociously over avant-garde production choices.
Danny has released many free projects over the web, the most popular being 2011's XXX. Brown released the album "Hawaiian Snow" with G-Unit's Tony Yayo and several mixtapes (Detroit State of Mind 1-4, Browntown, It's A Art (with producer Mainframe) and Hot Soup). Brown has found much success on the internet through the support of the music blogs and social media and the decision to release "The Hybrid" online as a free download.
Danny has worked with many artists in the Detroit hip-hop community such as the late J Dilla, Black Milk, Elzhi, Guilty Simpson, Trick Trick, and T3. Also known for championing up-and-coming artists, Danny has worked with lesser known acts such as Oakland, California's Main Attrakionz and is know for promoting these types of underground acts via his twitter.
The St. Johns Bizarre street festival is a single day event in the heart of the St. Johns neighborhood in North Portland that celebrates the unique character of the area. The festival has coupled itself to the St. Johns Parade, one of Portland’s longest running parades. In 2013, the Bizarre welcomed over 70 local vendors, selling an impressive array of handmade art and craft items, including jewelry and clothing, home goods, photography, and painting. Also featured each year are a number of food vendors, as well as booths featuring local community organizations. We seek to create a balanced offering of vendors that appeals to the entire community. The event also falls on Mother’s Day weekend so there will be lots of shoppers looking for that special something for the moms in their lives.