Ball of Wax Dance Party
(Vol. 28 CD Release)
Saturday, June 2nd, 8pm
The Black Lodge

w/OC Notes, Pufferfish, Poor Neighbors, Everything Points Up, Strong Like Woman, Foreign Friends, Bertolt Breast, Screens, and XY.
Free copy of BoW Dance party CD with entry!

I’ve been having more fun than usual mastering the newest volume of Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly (Vol. 28, Spring 2012). That’s because it’s the first-ever DANCE PARTY! installment of Ball of Wax, devoted entirely to drivin’, bumpin’, booty-shakin’, electronically-infused sounds. My goal is for it to be the soundtrack to Seattle’s summer. (Or at least the people in Seattle who are rad enough to know about BoW. Yep,that’s you.)

One thing I love about putting together themed volumes is the mix I get of artists I might never have heard from if they hadn’t realized I was looking for pieces from the likes of them (e.g. OC Notes, Strong Like Woman, Foreign Friends, XY, Screens) and old friends trying new and weird things, often in response to my call (e.g. Pufferfish, Jack Shriner’s Bertolt Breast [the best new band name I've heard in a while], Josh Morrison’s Poor Neighbors and Robb Benson’s Everything Points Up). It’s been an absolutely pleasure listening to the submissions and was quite the challenge to winnow it down to the 20 tracks that fill this CD, pushing the 80 minute mark.

The show itself should be a non-stop party, with upbeat sets from a wide range of artists. Maybe some DJing between sets? Sure, why not! The audience will leave, not only sweaty and with ears ringing, but with their very own copies of Ball of Wax 28 to take home and bump throughout the summer – and forever!

See you at the Dance Party!

I’m thrilled to have been invited once again to put together a showcase of Ball of Wax artists for the Festival, and it’s a pretty sweet lineup. Join us Sunday evening, May 27th, for sets from Tito Ramsey, Robert Deeble, The Foghorns, and Heatwarmer. That’s a pretty diverse lineup that offers an interesting cross-section of what I’ve been doing with Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly over 27 volumes and counting, from Tito’s sweaty one-man R&B, to Robert’s subtle, lush introspection, to the Foghorns’ shambling world-weary barroom folk, to the prog-Muppet-showtune insanity of Heatwarmer. I’m proud to bring these fantastic artists together on one stage, and very honored to be given the opportunity by the fine people at Folklife.

As an added bonus, you can come back on Monday afternoon for a three-hour long tribute to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, featuring many artists from the Ball of Wax Anthology tribute, plus many more fans of this wonderful collection of songs. I think we’ve got about 30 different artists playing songs from all 3 of the original volumes of the Anthology; you won’t want to miss a single one!

But Stellarondo has a bit of an ace up their sleeve in that they have a very talented writer on hand to tell you why you should donate it. I got this via e-mail this morning and thought it was absolutely worth the (longish) read – I love reading about non-musicians getting a glimpse into this weird little world of ours – so I’m just going to hand the mic over to Mr. Bass:

The tour is over, and I learned some things about musicians. I had thought they might be kind of like writers, in their habitual poverty, but I found out it’s much worse. As a writer you can’t get much more broke than broke: you write a story, a novel, or a lifetime of novels, or what-have-you, and either they sell or they don’t. Worst case, you’re out that investment of your time—call it a lifetime—and a few liters of ink, and some paper.

But to play music is to travel down into a pit of debt. Often—and I had heard that this was the case—the more you play, the poorer you can get, on the road. In this regard, the beauty generated by music carries quite a different price than that generated by literature. The smaller yet necessary venues in which off-the-top expenses for venue rental, sound engineer, lighting engineer, gas, van-wear, food, and drink lay waste to whatever number of folks wander in that night to listen to live music, and to living stories, and to this curious and unique thing we are giving breath to that combines the two in such a way as to make a whole that is greater than the parts. And then to divide that negative number then by five has the curious effect of making that debt smaller. It’s a curious paradigm.

There’s much more; go read it, and throw a few bucks in Stellarondo’s hat if you feel so inclined.

Genital Hospital are rude and hilarious (their 2011 EP is titled Ball My Children, of course). They are also loud and discordant and very good at what they do. The first transmission I read from them started: “Inspired by the sweaty house-party basements of their youth, 4 performance veterans in the Seattle area united to form Genital Hospital in the spring of 2011. Equal parts Jon Spencer, Shellac and Monorchid, Genital Hospital is on a mission to make you move.” Needless to say, my interest was piqued by the bands referenced, and I instantly went and listened to Ball My Children, which manages to justify such weighty comparisons. (I hear a little Jesus Lizard in there too, for what it’s worth.)

I didn’t know that I’d have less than a year to witness Genital Hospital live and see whether they can really deliver on their “sweaty house-party” aspirations, but something tells me this Friday will be the sweatiest the Seattle Elks Lodge 92 has been in quite some time.

Now visit the Grave Babies on Facebook.

I acquired this CD in Neenah, Wisconsin after playing with Southerly, and with Kat Terran’s band Snowdrift. Snowdrift — who are from Seattle — didn’t have much recorded at the time, but they had some of these, so a trade was effected.

This album is great, and I feel dumb that I didn’t even take the wrapper off until recently. I judged it by its cover, which to me looks a bit like psychedelic folk art from the ’70s . . . not entirely unlike a Cloud Cult album cover, but with more Middle-Earth runic-looking type, the sort of thing I’d seen too many times color-ink-jet printed and mailed to me when I used to run acoustic folk concerts. I also expected it to be a lo-fi solo singer-songwriter solo effort, which is the sort of thing I generally like, but for whichever reason (the cover, my trademark laziness, etc) I wasn’t inspired to open it up.

Well I was wrong on all counts. This is a tightly-arranged and very hi-fi album (produced by Portland’s Rob Bartleson, who appears a lot in this series), featuring some truly badass drumming, intricate folk-guitar, cello, and Kat Terran’s vaguely Celtic-sounding vocals on top of a very strong set of her songs. Her husband Derek is a talented multi-instrumentalist, and he played on and arranged a lot of the record.

The songs here mostly fall into a dark modal/Eastern folk type of sound, though with standard trap kit percussion. One song, “Dolls,” is straight up rock, but again very dark, reminiscent of mid ’90s alternative, with Tori Amos probably the laziest recommended-if-you-like comparison.

Lyrically, Kat describes images, moments in time, all imbued with a sort of fuzzy tragic import. “Three Friends” is an example. A seemingly optimistic road trip to the city becomes wistful, melancholy music:

Three Friends

So, judging books or albums by their cover — not recommended. While Kat Terran as a solo project hasn’t released music since Lion & Blue, she has music out with and is still active in Snowdrift.

Take Orcas, an ambient pop collaboration between Portland-based Benoît Pioulard and Seattle-based Rafael Anton Irisarri. They have an album coming out this month on celebrated German label Morr Music, have been profiled by both the Stranger and Mercury and even got a great review (7.7) on Pitchfork. So what do they sound like?

“Carrion” is certainly minimalist and restrained. It’s neat and well-executed, managing to layer in a number of midi and live instruments while still feeling coldly sparse and cerebral. The slow burns and emotive swelling might remind younger listeners of Grizzly Bear, but I immediately hear two musical touchpoints: Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock and David Sylvian’s Secrets of the Beehive. “Carrion” obviously makes use of more sophisticated electronic details (a sampled vinyl crackle texture low in the mix, for example) than two albums from over twenty years ago, but the artistic heart seems to be in the same place.

I’m not sure what it says about me that my first thoughts about Orcas was pinning down their influences (I’m old? A dick?), but check out Orcas on Facebook and look for their self-titled debut soon.

T-Model Ford & GravelRoad(photo via GravelRoad's website)

On April 6, 2012, two different strands of the newest blues movements will be on display in Seattle. Seattle’s own GravelRoad, promoting their excellent progressive/ acid blues album Psychedelta, will be at the Funhouse, and Portland’s Tango Alpha Tango, whom I covered in this forum and who have just released an outstanding new EP, Kill and Haight, will be at Comet Tavern.

This occasion gives me an opportunity to point out the brilliance of GravelRoad– and how they are the heirs of local legend Harry Smith’s best intentions. If you don’t know Harry Smith yet, you will. This Memorial Day Weekend, the recognition of local anthologist Harry Smith continues with a tribute at Seattle’s Northwest Folklife Festival. The Harry Smith concerts, which DJ Greg Vandy and our own Levi Fuller seem to have a large part in putting on, have been building steam. I am more and more impressed with how Mr. Vandy and Fuller have changed the dynamic of a group of songwriters, building collaboration and changing the critical voice, with this focus on classic material.

I’d explain how I feel a lot of us are learning about songwriting by studying the peculiar style of popular folk that Harry Smith tracked down. But that would get dry. Also, I flat out have conflicted feelings about the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music. Having grown up in a house that was part of the folk revival movement– Smith and Lomax dominated our record collection at home, and our library, and my father mocked any musician who played steel strings or, sin of all sins, plugged something in, I have always felt the package of Smith’s Anthology was beautiful but bogus. With the grain and click of those recordings, with the acoustic instruments and yearning vocals, Smith created a complete package that allowed its devotees to infer a rulebook on music and folk art.

I can’t fully articulate why I cringe over Smith’s masterwork. A recent very well-written book by Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, on paperback through Basic Books, explores the history of blues and folk archiving, and the strange tropes that great folk artists since the ’20s have been forced to follow. Hamilton argues that the folk or country blues– the old stuff on the Smith anthology– is really invented by the archivists and not the honest art that the original musicians would have chosen to release or represent themselves. I don’t fully agree with her entire argument, but she approaches my discomfort about the way a great, living music is isolated, stuffed, and taken out of context. (A particularly amusing and truthful moment in the book is when she points out how influential the country singer Jimmy Rodgers was among rural blues singers, to the point where Leadbelly repeatedly wanted to sing Jimmy Rodgers tunes instead of his own.)

What I want from folk and blues music is the straightforward emotional connection that this style of music allows, but I want it delivered on the artist’s terms. I want to feel as though the artist is performing the way he or she wants to, with full imagination and integrity. And this is where revivalists usually make my skin crawl. Revivalists often are forced to take a pose, limiting themselves or putting more energy into meeting expectations than into crafting and communicating through song.

When Fat Possum Records came up in the early 1990s, offering bold new takes on recording Northern Mississippi musicians, I was impressed. I loved the idea, but not all the recordings worked. Their Junior Kimbraugh recordings and RL Burnside are among the best in the history of blues. (And track down their Asie Payton CD, it is brilliant.) But one of their most legendary releases, T-Model Ford’s Pee Wee Get Your Gun, felt tack – like the old anthologists, the music ended up having to fit into a story, in this case that T-Model is tough and randy, and the music lost out.

Enter Seattle locals GravelRoad, whom I came upon based on the recommendations of Mr. Greg Vandy. These guys tracked down the above-mentioned T-Model Ford, and seemingly with egos entirely stowed away, offered to help him tour and record albums. The result is absolutely astounding. If you track down the Alive Records releases The Ladies Man and Taledragger, on outstanding electric collection of reworkings of great blues riffs with T-Model freestyling and reinventing on the fly, you hear the complete tradition of the blues cranked out by a 90-year-old bluesman with full integrity and imagination. GravelRoad is the foundation on both releases, the invisible foundation, something like Kazuo Ishiguro’s famous butler– never noticed, but the reason everything works.

Harry Smith tracked down great pop folk recordings from a previous era and released them in a palatable collection that allowed some great music to survive. The collection resulted in an odious byproduct of traditionalists swearing by rules that nobody with a soul would abide by. There have been a few other great anthologists and revivalists. And added to this list, accomplishing something that few other artists have, are Seattle’s own GravelRoad and their work with T-Model Ford. Listen to side two of The Ladies Man, a casual, beautiful jam through an original blues tune that then incorporates the Little Walter tune “My Babe,” and you hear the history of the juke joint. Listen to “How Many More Years” off of Taledragger, and you understand the living imagination of a great folk artist. This is something that has continuously astounded me since I bought these records two years ago. I know it has impressed others: at a New Year’s party, I played these records for half the night, and one of the people at the party eventually started a label so he could sign GravelRoad up.

Download the full Sunset Drumsets album for free right here.

Mike Dumovich

So I was, of course, ecstatic to hear that Mike has a new album, Acres, coming out very soon. I knew that Johnny Goss (Dandelion Gold, Cock & Swan – you can read me gushing over his production work here) was working with him on something, but I didn’t know until recently that it was ready to be released to the world. The album sounds, on paper, like quite the production: In addition to the multi-talented Mr. Goss, Mike has tapped some of Seattle and Vashon’s brightest musical lights for support. Acres includes contributions from Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang, Dave Abramson, Anna-Lynne Williams, Sam Watts, Bill Patton, Jonas Haskins, Greg Dember, and many more. On the production side, in addition to the talents of Johnny Goss, Toliver Goering and engineer par excellence Mell Dettmer also contributed. If that list doesn’t have your ears drooling, there’s something wrong with you. (Or maybe if your ears are drooling there’s something wrong with you. Whatever.)

Next Tuesday, April 3rd (which happens to be Mike’s birthday, so bring a cupcake or something), Mr. Dumovich and doom-surf geniuses Diminished Men will celebrate the release of Acres with a show at The Royal Room, the new Columbia City venue run by local music legend Wayne Horvitz. Mike’s live band will include many of the aforementioned local geniuses – making for a long night for Diminished Men drummer Dave Abramson, but a rewarding one for the rest of us. This is a night of music that is not to be missed. And it’s an early show (word has it it will start at 7 pm sharp), so don’t give me that “ah, it’s a weeknight” crap. Buy your tickets right now!