buffaBLOG - The Buffalo music blog: McDowell Mountain Fest

Showing posts with label McDowell Mountain Fest. Show all posts

Austin Psych Fest, Bonnaroo, camp bisco, carly, Coachella, Electronic Forest, Equals, Festival Bands Series, lollapalooza, McDowell Mountain Fest, Mission Creek, music festivals, Newport Folk Festival, pitchfork — 0 comments

Festival Bands, Man!: Wet Hair

After last week's Festival Bands, Man! feature, I got a friendly email from Mike Siemens of Psychic Rites, thank you. Good luck with your music video!

This week's feature is an Iowa City experimental band, off the Iowa City Mission Creek Music & Literature Festival going on April 2-7, called Wet Hair—the best best band name I've seen in a while. I love the whole tight-shorts-on-percussion-organ getup: a Night-People record label guy and his friend, both from Racoo-oo-oon (a quieter, more atmospheric, psychedelic quartet that broke up in 2007), plus another friend from Goldendust (a fancier, bleeped-out, shoegazey group).

So what does Wet Hair sound like? A bit like Atlas Sound, Crystal Antlers, Indian Jewelry, and The Doors. But more importantly, their sound is unique even while calling up vibrations of the collective universe. It reminds me of a French New Wave film score, but it also breaks open with alms of bouncy bass guitar and dial-twisting—as if music itself could become unconscious and dream. It's ethereal yet rooted, sad yet raucous. It's Wet Hair.

Their latest album, Spill Into Atmosphere, came out in 2012. They have several LPs, each one quite different. (I recommend In Vogue Spirit, 2011) They're opening, along with Love Songs for Lonely Monsters, for Deerhoof at Mission Creek Festival.

DETAILS

Band: Wet Hair

Festival: Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City

Venue/Stage: The Mill

Date & Time: Sunday, April 7 9:00PM

Austin Psych Fest, Bonnaroo, camp bisco, carly, Coachella, Electronic Forest, Equals, Festival Bands Series, lollapalooza, McDowell Mountain Fest, music festivals, Newport Folk Festival, pitchfork, sxsw, Treefort — 0 comments

Festival Bands, Man!: Psychic Rites

Psychic Rites, founded in Moscow, Idaho, is today’s FestivalBands, Man! feature. I found the self-described “aimless filters of sentience” cruising the Boise, ID Treefort Music Festival lineup. Moscow (Josh Ritter’s hometown) is a small hilltop university town where of a dear friend of mine grew up. An intense girl with a squeaky clean face and a piercing mind, I often wondered where a rebellious spirit like hers goes to play in a place like that: the woods, mostly; but there’s a hardness in her musings that seems cozier in concrete. Which is probably one of the reasons she’s a scientist. She’s a barefoot Idaho hippie, comfortable walking on cool moss or cold stone.

Psychic Rites has a similar expression—hell, the first single from their self-titled EP is “Concrete.” Another track, “Whispering of Eternal Things,” actually samples the pew-pew of a crowded city crosswalk. Cold, dark, wooded, wild, smooth, fresh: their music captures a European seriousness as well as a sprightly butterfly in its intricate electro-net. It’s sexy, forlorn, and folkloric, but totally Northwest American. Perfect for a chilly springtime night. This is Psychic Rites second year at Treefort. Full album due out this fall.

DETAILS

Band: Psychic Rites

Festival: Treefort Music Festival

Venue/Stage: The Crux

Date & Time: Thursday, March 21 12:30AM -1:30AM

Festival Bands, Man!: Daedelus

Considering thousands of arts lovers are trying to figure out their SXSW schedules and the website doesn’t have the bandwidth for it, I’m moving onto the March 8 & 9 festival, the New Orleans Buku Music + Art Project. I’m a sucker for anything with the word project in it: equal parts academic and workhorse. Which is exactly why prolific L.A. producer, Daedelus (Alfred Darlington), is the Festival Bands, Man! feature of the week. Also, because I’m reading Ulysses for the first time.

I went to a small Daedelus show a couple years ago, and his set up is unbelievable. A labyrinth of soft bright buttons EVERYWHERE! It’s hard to imagine each one is actually responsible for a new collection of sound. I found myself mesmerized by his speed—like a snake charmer—and could visualize the inside of his brain, each fold a cushion of light and music.

Just as James Joyce’s work is filled with abstract diversions, beautiful descriptions of intellectual goings on that make way, ever so subtly, to the daily transcript of what was going on all the while—the reader gets to day dreaming with the narrator—Daedelus (spelled differently than the Greek artisan and Stephen)’s gorgeous outpourings are fucking hard to understand.

I don’t even like it that much. It’s a bit much! (Like your really smarty pants friend who sometimes gets on a roll talking about a topic of Passion and you just have to bail until he catches on with a joke to break it up). And that’s what Daedelus is known for: throwing in a couple pop songs that are instantly transformed into a better quality leather, and in turn, make the rest of his furious ramblings seem much less eager.

He’s a genius producer and deserves a lot of respect and for us to lend our ear, because if he were a scientist, he would get a ton of funding, and if he were an author, we would read between the lines with painstaking gaiety.

DETAILS

Band: Daedelus (producer)

Festival: Buku Music + Art Project

Venue/Stage: Float Den

Date & Time: Saturday, March 9 11:00PM -11:45PM

Festival Bands, Man!: Equals

The second band in our Festival Bands, Man! series (in which I compare a band playing in a festival lineup to other, more familiar bands, and give you some details about their live show), is Equals. An experimental band from Austin, Texas, playing The Hideout at SXSW this year, Equals is like your friends’ bands, those that play art houses and tour locally, and sometimes get in a mini-van and play a few hours away. That’s not to say they’re not extremely talented musicians, but ambient, jazzy post-rock is a challenging genre to garner public interest, because it’s more personal reflection than musical expression. You have to be exceptional in some way; for Equals, it’s in the musical composition.

With the release of their first (self-titled) LP, engineered by Alan Douches (who’s worked with Animal Collective and Sufjan Stevens), Equals quickly (though not with certainty) sweeps up a little jam-band debris into a heavy can of silvery snare reps, scraps of guitar madness, and electrified, lolling melodies. It’s spell-casting music that will get festival goers in the mood for something rougher and weirder as the days tick by at SXSW; Equals, upbeat and impatient, like a séance calling up someone newly buried.

DETAILS

Band: Equals

Festival: South By South West (SXSW)

Venue/Stage: The Hideout

Date & Time: Tuesday, March 12 9:00PM -9:40PM

Austin Psych Fest, Bonnaroo, camp bisco, carly, Coachella, Electronic Forest, Festival Bands Series, lollapalooza, McDowell Mountain Fest, music festivals, Newport Folk Festival, pitchfork, Suuns, sxsw — 1 comments

Festival Bands, Man!: Suuns

Today’s the first post in a series I'm calling, "Festival Bands, Man!"

The idea is I pick a band I like that’s playing on the U.S. festival lineup, compare it to stuff, and give you the info on their show. I’ll go through music festivals (chronologically) like SXSW, Coachella, Austin Psych, McDowell Mountain, Electric Forest, Bonnaroo, Camp Bisco, Pitchfork, Newport Folk, and Lollapalooza (to name a few!), and hopefully locate some hidden gems.

Today’s Festival Bands, Man! band is...Suuns!

Suuns, one of the many, many rock bands playing at SXSW this year, is a quartet from Montreal whose next album, Images Du Futur, comes out March 5, 2013. So they're touring with new material, but kind of like Tokyo Police Club (after their first LP), they don’t need it. Their 2010 debut, Zeros QC, is very complete. The white-light, pretty rock reminds me of fellow Canadian pop artists, Caribou (who, btw, played one of the best live shows I've seen), but with way more electric guitar (to a classic rock degree) and not quite as much synthetic jingle bell. It also sounds like post-punk band Clinic, splashy electronic duo Fuck Buttons, and like me, when I sit down with a chaos pad and vocoder on my mouth (which means -loosely- it’s got a psytrance, home-sound vibe). The bass these guys supply can be powerful, so their live set could be nice and sweat-heavy.

DETAILS

Band: Suuns

Festival: South By South West (SXSW)

Venue/Stage: Red 7

Date & Time: Thursday, March 14 9:45PM -10:20PM

Venue/Stage 2: Swan Dive

Date & Time 2: Thursday, March 14 1:00AM - 1:50AM