anybody on this forum going?
Clavius Productions presents:
Thursday, November 2
The Red and the Black
1212 H St NE WDC
http://www.redandblackbar.com $8, 21+, doors at 8:30
The Places (Hush/Absolutely Kosher, folk/psych indie rock from Portland, OR)
Vialka (turbofolkgypsypunk micro-orchestra guitar/drums duo from France)
Sean Smith & Matt Baldwin (Primitive Americana fingerpicking duo from CA, Tompkins Square/Isota Records)
The Places http://www.dawnwalker.net The Places' Amy Annelle is a tough one to pin down. She lives on the road as often as not, touring and recording with friends, staying everywhere from a high desert trailer park to a flophouse on the Bowery, and picking up work as chamber maid, laborer, forest ranger and carny. Her maverick folk music, too, shies away from convention. Over the course of five acclaimed albums and hundreds of live shows, she's created a heavy, feral and beautiful body of work that "straddles the fence between the organic and the atmospheric" (Rolling Stone). Her recently released sixth album (and fourth as The Places), Songs for Creeps, finds Annelle at the peak of her powers.
The Places have roots in Portland, Oregon's recent rich and eclectic music scene, but Annelle's new songs shrug off the rain clouds and PBR hangover of the Northwest and demand a home all their own. That home was built in Austin, Texas' Wonder Chamber, a tiny garage studio full of weird instruments, cantankerous vintage gear and thrift store desert paintings. During recording sessions there with Okkervil River (as guest vocalist on the bandâ??s Black Sheep Boy) Annelle recognized a kindred spirit in producer Brian Beattie (Okkervil River, Daniel Johnston). The songs started flowing, and the pair went on to combine these prolific Wonder Chamber sessions with Annelle's home recordings to make Songs for Creeps, an experimental memoir of dark revelations. This misfitâ??s tale is raw, potent and direct: the antidote to the eerie, calm-before-the-storm acrimony and improvisation explored on the Placesâ?? last studio album, Call It Sleep. A few tracks from a marathon recording session with Jay Pellicci (Deerhoof, Erase Errata) at John Vandersliceâ??s Tiny Telephone studio in San Francisco complete the albumâ??s eleven cuts.
Released on Annelle's own High Plains Sigh label, Songs for Creeps builds on her acclaimed songwriting, studio-as-science-lab aesthetic, and fondness for field recordings and sound collage. But the large ensemble approach of past Places albums is gone. Annelle is joined by just a few very special guests, and did most of the arranging and playing herself. Album art is by E*Rock (The Planet The, Beck), who created the lucid, bad-dream cover for The Placesâ?? well-loved 2000 debut, The Autopilot Knows You Best.
The Places will be touring far and wide in late 2006 with a full-band lineup to support Songs for Creeps. They have shared the stage with such freaks (folk or not) as the Mountain Goats, Castanets, Smog, Roy Harper, Jolie Holland, Ian Moore, Michael Hurley, Tara Jane O'Neil, Elf Power, Bobby Conn, Damien Jurado, Little Wings, Thalia Zedek, Arbouretum, M. Ward and US Maple.
Vialka http://www.vialka.com Vialka is an inflatable submarine that survived the commercial war. It travels unrestlessly around the world to explore the rich diversity of its cultures before it is too late. Vialka is a noisy comedy not ashamed of its own way by scorn or ridicule. It is an invitation to dance to steady explosive rhythms, terror melodies and experimental movements. It is a symphony for humble flesh through the high spirits of rock 'n' roll.
The dynamic duo of Marylise Frecheville and Eric Boros have been bringing their gypsy turbofolkpunk music and lifestyle to all corners of the world for six years, originally as the rhythm section of the Swiss-based performance striptease jazz-punk trio NNY, as the experimental/noise performance project Hermit, and now with Vialka. They have lived in Switzerland, Slovenia, Canada, and are currently calling France their home between tours. Vialka's music, based on the interaction between Marylise's drumming and singing and Eric's guitar playing, draws its influences from traditional and modern music from around the world played with ecstatic energy and a sophisticated musical language all their own. They released their first two albums Tonight I Show You Fuck and Republic of the Bored & Boring on Manufracture Recordings, and have released Everywhere & Nowhere, a DVD documenting their work together over the first five years, and first full-length album Curiosities of Popular Customs, recorded by Bob Drake at Studio Midi-Pyrénées, and their latest release -- a split with Israeli klezmercore unit Kruzenshtern I Parohod (co-released with AurisMedia in Israel); all on their newly founded VIA label. Vialka is not just a musical project, but a social scientific experiment, attempting to meet and communicate with interesting and unknown musicians and artists from around the world -- with particular interest in polluted dictatorships, bleak colonies, and monarchic democracies. They have toured extensively in over 40 countries (100+ concerts per year) across Europe, Africa, North America and Asia, and have collaborated with Italian saxophonist Jacopo Andreini, Macedonian artist collective OPA, French cinematographer Laurent Varlet, Swiss cinematographer Sébastien Riond, French eco-designer Cédric Carles, members of the Chinese punk band SDL, the legendary former CAN singer Damo Suzuki, and New Zealand drummer Kieran Monaghan.
Eric Boros (Erik Boroš) began his musical career as a school-band trumpetist at a young age. Since then he has performed many times in many different "nation states" around the globe, and has participated in a wide variety of phonographic recordings --despite having crumpled his trumpet a long time ago in a fit of rage. For his work with different ensembles he plays stringed acoustic and electric guitars, while producing complex operatic "sounds" with his own voice. Although he lives without electricity, or any modern appliances (other than his solar-powered shortwave radio), he is a completely unskilled electrician, and has used this "unskill" to construct electronic gadgets to generate accompaniment frequencies to his symphonic pieces. Boros has been living in seclusion on an island, but travels regularily by kayak for Vialka repetitions and tours. He is a breath-air-ian, book reader, practicing pacifist, and tea drinker.
Marylise Frecheville was put on stage when she was three years old and became addicted to it. It is a matter of intestine regulation you see. After classical training in dancing, singing, drama and piano, she joined her first "rebel-without-a-cause" teenager garage band in 1993, where she played keyboards, sang out-of-tune, and eventually beat the skins. So now instead of building cathedrals, running after rabbits, or boozing until brain failure, she performs in various ways; constantly pushing insanity and constipation further away. Vialka is her latest baby, it shouts, it cries, it laughs, it whines -- oh no! -- it shit itself again, but it is still the most beautiful in the world. By the way, Marylise likes the little thing so much that she made a cartoon and movie of it; a story to actively remember the beginning of the millennium in which we are all going to die from severe screeningitis.
Sean Smith & Matt Baldwin http://www.seansmithlives.com http://www.myspace.com/seansmithlives Berkeley Guitar is a collection of new recordings by three of the Bay Areaâ??s finest young acoustic guitarists: Sean Smith, Adam Snider, and Matt Baldwin.
The city of Berkeley and the acoustic guitar share a rich, decades-long history -- most notably as the Sixties home base of Takoma Records, which released landmark recordings by John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke and many others. This history inspired three young guitarists from the Bay Area to create a document of the present-day guitar scene.
Produced by Sean Smith and recorded and mastered at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, CA, the package includes liner notes by Larry Kelp of Berkeley public radio station KPFA and Ed Denson, co-founder of Takoma Records. The album is available on CD and gorgeous limited edition deluxe gatefold vinyl.
