Likely you've already heard, be it from the Free Press or Detroit News or wherever else - so any superfluous blogging would probably sound like a "...don't forget!!" kind of a sing/songey adnauseum reminder.
Because, A.) Don Was always puts together a good show - bringing together Detroit greats via veterans and younger contemporaries with the All-Star Revue.
Alberta Adams / Dennis Coffey / Marshall Crenshaw Doop & The Inside Outlaws / Electric Lion Sound Wave Experiment / Ingray / Motor City Horns / Mayaeni / Andre Williams / Outrageous Cherry / The Satin Peaches / SRC Gary Quackenbush / Jere Stormer / Sun Messengers (30th anniversary this year!) / Kim Weston House Band Don Was, bass / Luis Resto, keyboard / Terry” Thunder” Hughley, drums / Brian “Roscoe” White, guitar / Shantelle Hawkins, back up vocals / Margaret King Ahmed, back up vocals / Consuela Lopez, back up vocals
B.) We have Mavis Staple headlining the main stage (at the Max M. Fischer) on Sunday night.
C.) The comparable Odu Afrobeat Orchestra are appearing just before supper time on the Comerica Diversity Stage, Sunday.
D.) Start your weekend, Friday, at the Detroit Institute of Arts - with a screening of the 1931 Spanish production of Dracula (using shots with the same sets from the Bela Lugosi. version).
E.) A Food Drive for Gleaners Community Food Bank, Saturday at the Fischer.
Outdoor activities...food...more local music.... You know...
A handful of Detroit bands have new music made attainable via your computers (or your smart phones or whatever new glowing comm-implants or gadgety inter-phone toys).
Desktop, an aptly named collaborative duo made up of Electric Six/Johnny Headband's Keith Thompson and Pop Project/Suburban Sprawl's Zach Curd, has completed it's second proper 3-song EP. Desktop 2 follows last year's Euro-Disco glitzed serving of cardio cuts heavy on sequenced beats and synthesized bass. While following the same formula (the two human halves each did their own distinctive song tweaking in separate rooms and emailed developments back and forth), 2 is more of an experimental rock tilt - guitars, bass, heavy reverb. The conditions are still right for danceability - but the milieu is one less digitized, maybe a bit more space-rock-ish but still tempered with lots of hooks and steady bass boomed underpinning.
Meanwhile - the perennially fluctuating electro-project Deastro (helmed always by songwriter Randolph Chabot) has released the darker, atmospheric-pop leaning Mind Altar EP, online, via Ghostly International - originally popping up as an 8-song cassette release via Deastro's blog. The sound is more worldweary, deeply wrapped in ethereal aural curtains of reverb and is a considerable swerve from 09's full-band affair Moondagger. Find the EP here.
And - masters of the poignant pop -> Josh Epstein (of Silent Years) and Daniel Zott (of The Great Fiction) have released the debut EP for their collaboration, Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr. The playfully absurdist live shows where they don sponsor-strewn jumpsuits matches the forceful, roaring suggestiveness of a title like "Horse Power" for a batch of pretty little electro ditties that feel more attuned to the fuzzy goosebump feeling of grass-splayed summer night star gazing or lovey-dove slow dances in the living room when the party lights start to dim. Find their stuff online here and see how the sports world reacts, via Yahoo!-- here. Find MP3's here.
Finally, Ann Arbor-based folk-dashed, orchestral-swept indie-pop quartet Light In August are working on the follow up to their debut Places. The eclectic, summery pop rockers are engaging in the practical Kickstarter route to help fans get in on their forthcoming album, Sweater Weather by donating towards part of the production costs. For more info - click here.
Angus Andrew tells me how quickly one becomes acclimated to a jail cell. He and his band, Liars, revered by art rock lovers of any nuance, be it for their shock-n-dread dynamics, their torrential rhythm assemblages or their haunted-head-harmonies, spent a day in late May performing live songs in a penitentiary, each of them, guitars, amps, drums or microphone, behind bars in their own box. (view it here via Pitchfork TV)
“You do immediately get a shot of some sort of visceral kind of impulse from your surroundings,” the tall lanky Australian admits, as can be viewed online in full wall-bouncing explosiveness. “And, yeah, I felt very connected to that space. The idea of being kind of locked up, especially in that kind of prison is a really interesting kind of physical embodiment of some of the ideas that I think we play with, with the music that we make.”
The latest batch of music made by Liars is this spring’s Sisterworld, an almost-concept album inspired by some dark elements of society particularly on display in Angus’ neighborhood in Los Angeles – blunt and bellicosely tongue-in-cheek haranguing of ugly displays, some of them intrinsic to L.A., others perhaps indicative of many streets throughout any metropolis. The trio (with Aaron Hemphill, Julian Gross) met at art school in that city, formed soon after at the millennium but soon transported to New York where they fell into the brief media craze of the early decades’ spate of no-wave inspired dance-punk revivalism. They survived, evolved and elevated to noise-rock aristocracy, endeared to many by their austere and beautiful compositions of fright and freak framed rock storms balancing falsetto whisper howls with phlegm fired battle screams.
They resettled around L.A. after 07’s guitar-fuzz dominant self-titled album and would wind up recording this latest album in about a dozen different locations around the world. It’s songs are not all L.A. murk and melodrama; less an indictment and more a lifting of rose-colored lenses. L.A., after all, has always felt like a home for the band.
“There’s a lot of things that are good about L.A. that are also not that well understood,” Andrew said. “That’s part of the allure for me, for L.A., is this idea that it’s not very well understood and that there are things about it that you can still discover that are surprising. One thing is the notion that L.A. is about having a car and driving a lot and dealing with the freeways and stuff. I enjoy this sort of enclave that you can find here where you don’t really need to live or drive across the whole city.”
For now, Andrew said, L.A. fits.
“Personally, I think I go in and out of phases of being interested and then disgusted by American culture. Sometimes I’d feel like I really want to engage with it and then sometimes I feel like I need to get on the other side of the world from it.” As he did, in fact, spending the mid-to-late 00’s in Berlin. “At the moment, I’m into it.”
The perennial descriptor stuck upon Liars is their propensity for swerving off into different styles from album to album, throwing off any attempt to label them as dance-punk, no-wave, rhythm-heavy drone, shoegaze, noise-rock, whatever it may be, it never sticks for long, through their 5 major albums. But sensory words like dread, anxious, or spooky (they did have a Witch-themed album) always come up.
“Over time,” Andrew said, “it’s become maybe clearer to people that even though stylistically some of our records have been quite different, that, actually there is this vein that runs through everything and I think particularly when you see us play live, nowadays, where we’re able to play songs from each of the records, it feels like that there isn’t actually that drastic of a change between records.”
Why the spook, why the dread, why the alarm. “Why they’re there, I don’t know,” Andrew said. “I think that’s something that we tried to tackle with Sisterworld; this idea of being displaced or in some sense out of touch with the middle-you or whatever. A sense of detachment and sort of fear or paranoia that comes with that and how do people deal with that? I think that’s sort of stuff that was being written about but maybe in Sisterworld we tried to explore some sort of answer to…”
Whether any sort of comfort can be found in a jail cell, Andrew admits that the band are more than comfortable, particularly lulled a bit into a state of confidence to experiment, in the sometimes fantastically perceived world of Los Angeles. It is the point of their genesis and now, ten years later, returned to and somewhat documented on their latest album.
“It really felt like, in a lot of ways, even though it’s not my home, it was in a sense a coming-home record,” Andrew admitted. “And, in a way something that we felt like we kind of earned after having been traveling a lot over the last few years and trying out a lot of different things and places to live. It was a chance for us to really regroup and for the first time take the amount of time we wanted to on making it, which was completely new because we were always in a rush on all the records that we made. Finally we’d earned the right to take advantage, maybe, of what we’ve achieved and utilize it in order to make the record we wanted to make.”
Build your endurance. Up your intake of vitamins and minerals - and echinacea tea... (and, maaaybe not Kombucha)... But - if one plans on surviving the whirl of late-ish bar nights with loud music blaring and the cruel enticement of the waiting bar and it's varied sordid spirits combined with your early morning clock-ins to the assorted day-jobs - then you're going to need a plan.
Naps in the break room? Or balance that delusion of "functioning alcoholic" during the night hours with "functioning zombie" during the preceding day hours.
Tuesday Night - Richie and Carrie realign to host "Tuesdays In The Forest" at the Loving Touch pool hall in Ferndale. Show up at ten - for drink specials - a DJ (with Ritchie) spinning all night - and a performance from Josh Epstein of the Silent Years and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr...(the latter of said-two projects has an EP on the horizon, open up your ears).
Thursday Night - still....again...in Ferndale, now back at the Loving Touch - anthemic bash balladeers The Beggars are joining with the kaleidoscope-space-pop collective Macrame Tiger (filmed above during one of the inaugeral New Center Park parties) and welcoming NC-based metal band Colossus.
next Wednesday Night - 7/21 - still in Ferndale - over at Club Bart - the Loco Gnosis Presents series brings Pink Lightning and Black Lodge up to the very cozy, triangular, over-the-bar stage. The latter of said-two bands is welcoming Eric Dilworth (of Isles of E.S.P.) on guitar.
Naps!
Oh, and there's things Saturday - more on that soon...
Echo Fest "will showcase what we believe to be five of the best echo-, delay-, and psych- bands Detroit has to offer, with mind-bending visuals all night and sweet psych music between sets."
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From the first interview I ever 'conducted' with psych-power-trio known as Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor (back to the days of Sik-Sik Nation), they already had started musing on the potential, and the begrudged under-the-radar restriction to the activities, accomplishments, and camaraderie of the SE-Michigan-area's Psychedelic Scene.
We've had our garage thing. We had our space pop thing. Even our electro-dance thing. Now, they've put together something to comemorate the psyche-thing with a handful of bands from the area: Fur., Electric Lions, Solar Temple Cult (formerly Friends of Dennis Wilson), and 800-Beloved, join the Sisters on July 17 at the Lager House.
"We named it Echo Fest to celebrate all the bands in Detroit that use heavy reverb and delay in their songwriting," Sisters bassist Eric Oppitz said. "There were a few more bands that we would have loved to include, but the sheer logistics would have made it impossible to book everyone on the same date."
It works out though, Oppitz said, because each band can get a full set, plus, they can always "hold the event again next year with a totally fresh line up."
Electric Lions singer/guitarist Rabeah Ltief (who also recently joined Solar Temple Cult) has shared a few philosophical conversations with Oblisk singer/guitarist Asim Akhtar, regarding psychedelic as a "genre" or "classification." He stressed that it is based in pure feeling - anything providing a quasi-natural "high" from an aural effect, be it echo, reverb or distortion, has the spirit of psychedelic music.
Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor have their albums up for free download at their site.
The Ferndale Public Library is (eventually) re-opening at it's original location, (likely in the mid-to-late summer). Having recently been souped up with impressive (and some much needed) renovations (thanks to a 1-mil tax hike graciously supported by voters back in 2007) the staff, teamed with the Friends of the Ferndale Library have organized an open house-esque celebration for the community to come see the stunning transformation.
Construction workers have torn down walls, raised roofs, planted soil on roofs, expanded to property a few thousand sq feet outwards in all directions and added a green-friendly irrigation system and geothermal heating and cooling system.
Plus, all the books, movies, newspapers, dvds, cds, audiobooks, magazines, encyclopedias you've come to expect from the classic romanticized library of old, in all it's Dickens and Fitzgeraldian musty glory - but bolstered now by new study rooms, a teen reading area, a new children's reading area and a new computer lab (which, goes without saying: new computers, too!)
The open house celebration is July 10 - from 12noon - 8pm at 222 East Nine Mile. Come. Revel. And enjoy. Enjoy the sights. Enjoy the staff (full disclosure, that includes me) and enjoy the music.
Repeat: Enjoy the music.
Live performances from local heroes: The High Strung / The Pop Project / School of Rock / The Mydols / Pete Pelter & Paul Gaughan
+ Food and Children's Activities - and more.
Thank you for all your support and stay tuned - the library will be opening for regular service as soon as possible.
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - punk, rockabilly, Delta, New York, funk, soul, garage, detonated disco and disembowled grunge - spiny to the touch and spicy to the taste - after their two decades-long jarring journey, it goes without saying that all these sensiblities were piflered and stirred together by these refined, disaffected, left-field flying musical mutants into a new, devestatingly iconoclastic blend of the blues.
When no one could hang any fitting classification of all the moods and movements rattled above, Spencer himself spewed in his bendy twanging rustbelt croon that, in fact, "The Blues is # 1" - clarifying, "I don't play no blues - I play rock n roll." Gotta be careful with these things. Because the bottom line remains, that, still, "the blues is number one..."
And - starting in early 2010 - Spencer, with his longtime mates Judah Bauer and Russell Simins, linked up with Majordomo (part of Shout Factory) to start a reissue campaign of digitally mastered material spanning their career's worth of albums and adding in a bevy of b-sides, rarities and live recordings.
After early spring's debut of Dirty Shirt Rock n Roll: The First Ten Years - they've moved onto their post-Orange material by re-unveiling 1996's Now I Got Worry--recorded between down in the heart of the Delta with blues aristocrat R.L. Burnside, funk/soul aristocrat Rufus Thomas and electro/hip-hop aristocrat Money Mark. You get 12 bonus b-sides on this one... (info)
This year, they followed that with the 1997 rare live album Controversial Negro - originally just a promo here in the states that quickly went out of print, this is a 1996 show from Tuscon AZ that offers four previously unreleased live songs. (Also featuring 12 more live songs from a 1994 show at the same Tuscon venue... -info-
But the latest of the latest Jon Spencer news (besides their July 16 Crofoot show with Duende, in Pontiac MI), involves a new recording project where he and his wife, Cristina Martinez (who, with Spencer, helmed the shambled frightful blues punk of Pussy Galore) are gracefully stomping and grinding their heels, howls and spilt-out strum storms over the eclectic musical visions of celebrated Netherlands' singer/songcrafter Solex (Elisabeth Esselink).
Hip/hop in its driving beat, sample-heavy nature, but ranging from dirty garage, to groove-heavy soul, to rattled krautrock, to brass-blown, string sawed bridges between funk grandeur and classic pop melody musing. The experimental Solex, known for her wide range of taste and quirky, electronica-leaning pop's strut, lays many a strange drum-n-bass dominant platter for Spencer and Martinez to mold and explode together - the results of which being a very freeform, here-n-there head spinner of a spaced out funk odyssey, often too intriguing or perhaps suspensful (in its: what instrument will they bring in next and what meandering riff will they spread with it) to necessarily set a straight dancey, or head-bobbing vibe between soul or hip/hop, but still highly rewarding in that it'll likely be one of the more unique albums (or, musical conversations) released this year.
An invigorating, weird, winding soul-search for one white-faced clown turns into some sort of cabaret-jotted odyssey into a freaked and flamboyant vision of Alighieri's Divine Comedy, via the flim-flanked, costume piled performance art of Funy As Hell -
Recently posted up to be eligible for Best Theatre Group, the dadaist vaudevillian, Satori Circus, paired with the Dambacher brothers, will recreate their dreamy/nightmarey/devlish disection that graced the stages of Meadowbrook (up in Rochester) and Yale University (over in New Haven CONN) respectively - two days (7/9 and 7/10) at 1515 Broadway.
And that album title's Macbethian-ring could suffice enough to give the proper theatrical heralding for the Tuesday night Ann Arbor appearance of way-northern England's sibling indie-folk songstresses... Rachel and Becky Unthank(s) -
They seem veritably held infallable by the whole Euro/UK realm of listeners, be they regular mouse clickers just like you or be they Steve Reich's and/or Radioheads just like the esoterics that SPIN and NPR assure that you behold. So - why not say hello - since they're coming across the pond to play for you. Their's is an austere, fable flown artsy pop, of bonny lads and fisher's windblown journeys and too-quickly-fallen widowers. Their third LP ("Tender Coming"^) came out this spring on Rough Trade.
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The Ferndale Public Library 
