A quadruple dose of psychedelia on Thursday night, of both the heavy stoner and the woodland folk variety...
Clavius Productions presents:
Plastic Crimewave Sound Josephine Foster & The Supposed
Sharron Kraus Lionheart Mirth
Thursday, August 19
Warehouse Next Door
Doors at 8:30, show at 9pm
$6
Plastic Crimewave Sound From Chicago, Eclipse Records
Splits with Oneida and Michael Yonkers
Heavy brain-frying space-punk fuzz rock a la Hawkwind, Chrome, Stooges, Comets on Fire, etc.
Plastic Crimewave Sound is something like the musical analogue to the Galactic Zoo Dossier fanzine, and their first single Grade Ceased, is about what you??d hope for from that connection. It is loud, crude psychedelic sludge, with heavily amped and effected guitars slicing through the swamps of midnight, with vocals buried in tanks of Japanese laughing gas, and rhythms sliding along like moist candy dropped from the lips of Alan Vega.
-The Wire, 2003
A wonderful ball of scuzz that will drag you down the psychedelic path to self-destruction, smashing your face into a CAN the whole ride. Dirty dirges of sound swirling around my head, start to make me worry who may be watching me through the windows and I start to see little glass spiders running up and down my arms in a paranoid haze. Mr.Crimewave has done an excellent job with the record, and if you have ever had re-occurring nightmares from too much cough syrup, then this will be the tasty dish you??ve waited for your whole life.
-Horizontal Action, 2003
Josephine Foster & The Supposed From Chicago, of Born Heller & Children's Hour
Acid-laced folk-rock in the vein of early Fairport Convention, Byrds, and Jefferson Airplane
Press for Josephine's other bands:
Josephine Foster: (harp, mandolin, guitar); Jason Ajemian: (stand up bass). Born Heller are the earthen folk duo of Josephine Foster (Children's Hour) & Jason Ajemian and one of the better kept secrets to emerge out of Chicago's clandestine campfires and music dens. Their sound captures an Appalachian- transatlantic folk tradition so effortlessly that if it didn't already exist, they would have had to invent it themselves. Foster's spine tingling vocal delivery has been rightly compared to the likes of British folk legend and current hipster fave, Shirley Collins. On their debut, that voice is finally given full justice by the spare rhythmic arrangements of Ajemian on strings. Recorded by Paul Oldham in Louisville Kentucky."
Last year, the Children's Hour's SOS JFK album introduced the world at large to the vivid vocals of Josephine Foster. Even though they hail from Chicago, the duo mine a fine line in flowery folk-revivalism, their gear sounding as if of another time and place, having more in common with the commons and fields and magpie meadows of English folk-revival records than with the windy city in which they currently dwell. Central to such an evocative effect is Foster's pretty presence, the songbird's singing fluttering over florid blossoms, turning a wheeling wing to arc skyward, and seeming to toss and pitch on the whimsy of the wind. And it's this voice that is center-stage, again, in Born Heller, her other folkie duo.
Whilst the Children's Hour were already working with a largely stripped-down sound, Born Heller take this even further, sketching desolate environs whose Spartan strings cast settings that evoke darker visions, forsaking folk's winsome woodland wonder to render those same woods as the eerie, spooky tangles of trees into which folk wander and never return. In a more modernist fashion, there's a certain kind of "experimentalism" present in their songs, the tonal austerity of strummed mandolin and deftly-bowed double-bass an arrangement on which the album leans often, Born Heller essentially specializing in a solemn, modernist riff on folk.
Sharron Kraus From the UK, currently residing in Philly
Camera Obscura Records
Currently residing in Philadelphia after years of studying at Oxford, Sharron Kraus may be this generation's answer to those highly revered interpreters of traditional British folksong, Sandy Denny and Shirley Collins. Like Gillian Welch, Kraus writes her own ballads, though hers are steeped more in the Child and Sharp ballads of England instead of the Appalachia of Welch (which of course derive from the same sources). Kraus has recorded two phenomenal albums for Camera Obscura and plays solo, accompanied only by guitar, banjo, or whistle.
"There are a few who fight a lonely battle against world music's commercialized and warped definition of folk. People like Timothy Renner, the Iditarod and Gillian Welch who dig their hands deep into the soil of an unnerving past. And let us now also count Sharron Kraus among them. She's been playing music for a decade, but it's not until now she makes her debut on record - many thanks and congratulations to Camera Obscura for that. And what a debut it is! Kraus's songs are rooted as much in Appalachian styles as in the gloomier side of British folk song with a touch of Lal Waterson. And like Waterson, Kraus has a voice of a woman, not a girl. The instrumentation is sparse, often only an earthy banjo and a gritty fiddle. The songs are like omens of a world going decidedly wrong but with alluring melodies to trick you into the trap. When the song deals with family traditions it is ridden with guilt and accusations. When she sings of love, it is of physical affection between twins or if Kraus cares to pour light into the grim story at all it is still marred with rue and regret. The world as seen through the songs of Sharron Kraus is a relentless place of faded sepia. The only way to endure it is to turn ugliness into beauty. It doesn't really matter what is wrong, because there is no right left. Morals change and distort and you won't notice. Beautiful Twisted is the perfect title. Many singers have explored the shady side of the world and the minds of those who inhabit it, but few have done it as convincingly as Sharron Kraus. It's too early to name Beautiful Twisted a classic, but I doubt you'll find a better example of a true future folk classic this early in the new millenium." -Peter Sjoblom (The Broken Face)
Lionheart Mirth From San Francisco
Members of Crack W.A.R., Zeek Shek and various noise ensembles
A psychedelic transcontinental sound: flute with pedals, heavy guitar, percussion, keys, raspy vox, chanting, etc.
