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Photos: Avant Fairfax II
The lessened novelty, the rain and the timing – before local students have gotten back into the swing of things – all conspired such that this past weekend’s second iteration of Avant Fairfax wasn’t quite as well-attended as the first. But that didn’t stop eight bands (and one filmmaker) from putting on an entertaining spectacle in an unfinished second story of a nameless commercial building in downtown Fairfax.
Some personal highlights:
- Janel and Anthony’s set was my favorite, a cello/guitar duo that bounced between experimental noise and beautiful, pastoral melody.
- Max Ochs (pictured above) performed a Turkish song, confessing that he doesn’t know a word of Turkish. His lyrics were a “trans-phoneticism” (his term) instead of a translation – he basically took the original Turkish vocals and turned them into their closest English analogue by sound alone.
- Gondola played a single long jam with gobs of head-nodding riffs, psychedelic wailing and no dynamics whatsoever. They’ve got the Earthless-style heavy psych-rock thing down to a T.
More thoughts and photos after the jump, and see the full gallery here.
Avant Fairfax Returns Tomorrow
April’s inaugural Avant Fairfax festival was such a success that the organizers immediately turned around and starting working on the next installment. The second iteration of the festival is now upon us, and will feature a diverse lineup of eight performers (from the folk stylings of Max Ochs to the psych-rock of Dark Sea Dream and Gondola) as well as a short film.
It’s scheduled for 5pm-1am tomorrow, August 22, 2009; here’s hoping for tighter timing, as the original fest went overtime and forced headliners Cheer-Accident to cut their set short. The venue this time around is the ” . ” (Point in Space) Gallery in Fairfax City [3940 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030]. Suggested donation $5.
Check out the lineup after the jump or visit Avant Fairfax at Myspace.
Photo: John Stanton of Kuschty Rye-Ergot, from the first fest.
Photos: The Pretenders @ Warner Theatre
Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders hit the Warner Theatre last Friday evening, supported by the odd combination of manic Juliette Lewis and soporific Cat Power (whose set was excellent, but she did not allow any photography so you won’t see anything from it here).
More photos at the full gallery and after the jump.
Photos: Grey Eye Glances @ Jammin’ Java
Grey Eye Glances, a Philadelphia-area folk-rock band with a small but quite dedicated following, played to an appreciative crowd at Jammin’ Java last Sunday night, in their first area show in 2-3 years. Their two sets featured a number of brand-new songs as well as some reliable old standards, particularly from 1997’s Eventide. Many of the old songs were spiced up by some live arrangements that allowed the band to stretch out a bit – especially guitarist Brett Kull (whose instrumental explorations with Grey Eye Glances have some precedent, as he, along with drummer Paul Ramsey, is also in prog-rock group Echolyn).
The band’s principal songwriter, Dwayne Keith, mentioned that they have an unfathomable number of new songs already written and just have to figure out which ones to use on a potential upcoming recording. This should be welcome news for those fans who have been waiting since 2002’s A Little Voodoo for some new material.
A few more photos are here and after the jump.
Q&A: Udi Koomran, Audio Engineer for Shub Niggurath
Udi Koomran is an audio engineer based in Tel Aviv, Israel, who has made quite a name for himself in the world of avant-garde progressive rock. Most recently, he remastered the 1985 debut cassette tape by French band Shub Niggurath. Released as Introduction by France’s Soleil Zeuhl records, this album is reviewed in this week’s City Paper.
Koomran has worked with musicians from all over the world, including as a live soundman with Belgian “chamber-rock” group Present, on an international tour that hit the United States in 2005. He’s worked on recordings by 5uu’s and Ahvak, and in fact is credited as a full member of those bands on their recent releases. Additionally, Koomran has recorded works by experimental jazz musicians like Russian pianist Slava Ganelin and unclassifiable contemporary musicians like Israeli composer Yitzhak Yedid.
I conducted an e-mail Q&A with Koomran to find out a bit more about his experience working with this long-lost album. Read the full Q&A after the jump, and scroll down all the way to the end for some samples from Introduction. (As an imported obscurity, Introduction can be tough to find – try Wayside Music for a CD or Anthology Recordings for a download.)
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Photos: Fuck the Facts @ Talking Head
Canada’s Fuck the Facts are often pigeonholed as grindcore, but last year’s Disgorge Mexico showed the trio blowing up genre conventions and exploring sounds all their own. At their show last night in Baltimore, their setlist drew mainly from that album, bringing much-needed freshness to a show which to that point had been dominated by fairly cookie-cutter metalcore.
Fuck the Facts circa 2009 take the manic intensity of grindcore and tone it down a bit by throwing in all sorts of unexpected influences: slow, heavy sludge riffs, the occasional atmospherics, jazzy breaks, stoner-rock grooves, and full-on noise. The mastermind is guitarist Topon Das, but vocalist Mel Mongeon gets all the attention: while perhaps not the most dynamic of vocalists, her growls are incredibly harsh and fit the music perfectly, and her presence as a frontwoman is impressive to say the least, stalking around the stage looking like she was ready to explode into the crowd at any second. (Last night, she never did, but I’d guess that at better-attended shows the stage is not sufficient to contain her intensity.)
The biggest concession to grindcore convention that Fuck the Facts made was that they played an extremely short set, less than 30 minutes in total. Better too short than too long, as Mongeon intimated afterwards, but with metal this progressive and diverse, I could have done with much, much more.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
EDIT: Metal Injection has posted three videos from this show, with great sound quality.
Fleet Foxes Fans: Don’t Miss Espers Tomorrow
Fleet Foxes have sold out two shows at the 9:30 Club tomorrow night. If you’re one of the folks with tickets, a word of advice: show up early to see Espers, who will be opening both shows. Espers are a Philadelphia-based band playing folk music with a heavy dose of psychedelic rock influence. Acid-drenched electric guitar and gorgeous vocal harmonies are their tools of the trade. Fronted by Meg Baird (who had a recent solo album out on Drag City, Dear Companion) and Greg Weeks (who – obscure trivia time! – once ran a prog-rock mail-order operation called New Sonic Architecture), this sextet takes beautiful but brooding folk songs and turns them into dark, intense journeys into the night.
Listing bands like Fairport Convention, Pentangle and Incredible String Band as influences, Espers are a solid pairing with Fleet Foxes. Their music is weightier and darker, but equally inspiring in its ethereal beauty. They’ve been largely inactive since their 2006 sophomore album II, so this is the first chance in a long time that anyone has gotten to see them. If you don’t have a ticket to either of these shows, Espers will also be appearing at Sonar in Baltimore, supporting Kurt Vile, on August 11.
Photo courtesy of Espers’ Myspace page
Photos: Bloody Panda & Salome @ The Red and the Black
Bloody Panda and Salome brought deafening volume levels to The Red and the Black’s tiny performance space last Thursday night. Bloody Panda (pictured above) is a six-piece from New York City, signed to the brilliant Profound Lore Records, whose recorded output is an intriguingly unconventional mix of glacial riffs and ethereal vocals. Their live show completely failed to connect with me, unfortunately, with the compositions seeming disjointed and several ideas dragged out for far longer than they deserved.
Salome, Virginia’s best doom metal band, probably need little introduction here. Thursday was their last D.C.-area show before kicking off a lengthy tour in September (with Hull and the absolutely fantastic Batillus) that the band still need help booking. Their set was tremendous as always, and the material seemed a bit more diverse than I’d noticed before, with long sections of droning feedback juxtaposed against much faster sections of near-blast-beat intensity.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
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Photos: Jucifer @ Ottobar
The husband/wife duo of Amber Valentine and D.C. native Edgar Livengood, aka Jucifer, don’t really tour so much as they live their lives on the road. Of the many bands out there that seem to tour constantly, Jucifer probably has them all beat. So it makes sense that their live show is a completely different animal from their recorded output.
On record, Jucifer’s music is song-based heavy alternative rock with the occasional curveball thrown in from sources as diverse as sludgy metal, pseudo-grindcore, neo-folk balladry and more. But live, Jucifer is, pure and simple, a volume fetishist’s dream, with enough amps to play an arena show without a PA. (At the Ottobar, the venue PA was used, and hilariously, all but one of the stage monitors was turned to face the audience.) They play all the loud and heavy stuff and none of the poppier stuff, with no breaks between songs, such that the entire concert experience is a visceral exercise in noise. This is either a beautiful thing or a supremely annoying thing, depending on who you ask.
The small but enthusiastic crowd on Monday night at the Ottobar seemed to fall in the former camp. Jucifer’s short set was satisfying, cathartic, and well-received. A band that tours this much and regularly plays to tiny audiences has to love what they’re doing, and with Jucifer this comes through in the almost joyful intensity they exude onstage. It’s the loudest live show this side of Sunn O))), and it’s a hell of a lot of fun to boot.
More photos after the jump, and check out the full gallery including the three opening bands.
Photos: Atheist @ Jaxx
Last Friday night, Jaxx may have been the best place to find the highest concentration of absurdly talented musicians in the D.C. area. Florida legends Atheist, featuring a brand-new guitarist who made his debut at Maryland Deathfest, headlined a show full of technical metal bands and enough fast riffage, blast beats and time changes to make any metal nerd happy. Atheist was great, and visibly looser and more confident than their somewhat tentative show at MDF back in May. Their setlist drew from numerous albums in the band’s discography, and other than an unfortunately-timed sound issue that marred “Mother Man” (from the classic Unquestionable Presence), the band was tight and seemingly flawless.
More words and images after the jump; an excessive number of photos can be found at the full gallery.
