Album Review: This Is a Process of a Still Life

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Louis O'Callaghan

This Is a Process of a Still Life – self-titled (Firefly Sessions, 2004)

[Note: this review is part of the Bad at Listening series.]

This is the first review of this series and I’m already breaking a rule, in that I’ve listened to this one before . . . it was in my actual music collection pile. I got it at the first stop of my 2004 “national tour,” or more accurately my 2004 “extremely long and expensive road trip.” Ah, I can picture it now . . . late July, Missoula Montana. A hot night, an unregulated all-ages club: the Area 5 Art Gallery (which is long gone). Kids at a show drinking and smoking, a four-band bill headlined by veggie bus hippies from the east coast. What could be better?

This Is a Process of a Still Life were second to last, and they were great. Their set was full of long, intricately composed instrumentals, performed expertly by five dudes with energy and stamina, not unlike hardcore kids taking up jazz. I remember thinking they were a lot like Wow and Flutter. I think it’s called post rock.

This is a Process of a Still Life – No Memory of the Airshow

This recording represents them well, though perhaps mellower. “Shimmering.” There’s a word. The sound of clean guitars through delay pedals, Rhodes piano — suites more than songs, building peaks and valleys, but never at extremes. Also, there’s backwards stuff. I love backwards stuff. And, the songs are just really pretty, and it helps that the recording is excellent (it was produced by Portland’s Rob Bartleson).

These guys are still around, post-lineup changes and moving from Missoula to Seattle. They also changed their name to SCRIPTURES: http://www.myspace.com/thisisaprocess

Posted in Album Reviews, Bad at Listening, Recorded Music | 1 Comment

Check Out This Song: Prairie Empire – “Snow”

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Levi Fuller

Hey, check out this song! It’s another longtime friend of Ball of Wax. Seattle/Portland/New York’s Brittain Ashford has played for a long time under her own name, but for her next release, perhaps due to its collaborative nature, felt moved to adopt a more band-like moniker, so it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Prairie Empire (though you might have heard them on the most recent volume of Ball of Wax).

The song “Snow” is a perfect example of some of the lovely things about Brittain/Prairie Empire’s music: The lush instrumentation of strings and simple yet propulsive percussion built around her buzzing, thrumming dulcimer; her mercurial voice, the lead so soft at times you think it might disappear, while at the end she backs herself up, along with a whole gang of friends, as if hollering from the other end of a phone line. Brittain is a very talented songwriter and singer with a fondness for old, weird instruments who’s joined with a great group of musicians in creating Prairie Empire’s self-titled debut. I look forward to its release this spring, as well as their performance March 13th at the Sunset Tavern.

And now: check out this song!

Prairie Empire – Snow

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Songs about Books: And the First Book Is . . .

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Paul Constant

As Levi mentioned yesterday, he asked me to take part in his exciting new Songs about Books project. I interviewed the five musicians who volunteered for the job, and picked books for them to write songs about. For the next few days, I’m going to be unveiling my choices here on the BoW blog. I’m not going to talk specifically about why I made the connections I did—I’ve got to save something for the concert and CD publishing party in August—but I am briefly going to talk about my relationships to the books I chose.

The first interview I did for this project was with Alex Guy, who makes music as Led to Sea. She was an ideal first interviewee: Patient, funny, and willing to walk with me through the process of deliberation. We shared a pot of tea at Elliott Bay Book Company and talked about her prior experiences combining books with music (she used passages from Galeano’s suberb Book of Embraces as lyrics in a song not so very long ago). The decision for her book came to me first, and while my choices for all the other musicians changed at least twice during the selection process, I always knew the whole time that I was going to assign Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov to Alex.

I read all of Nabokov’s books about ten years ago now, starting with Lolita. (In order to make the books less intimidating to me, I had to scour Boston’s used bookstores to find mass-market paperback editions of every one of his novels; those editions—as pulpy and gaudy-looking as the dime-store science fiction novels I love so much—made his work more accessible to me somehow.) While Pale Fire isn’t my favorite of his (that would be Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle), I think it’s the one that resonated with me the most. I like novels that take the form of something else, and Pale Fire‘s narrative disguised as critical analysis speaks to me on what is probably an embarrassingly obvious level. Nabokov called Lolita the story of his love affair with the English language, but I think Pale Fire is the story of his love/hate relationship with the idea of language in general.

Asking Alex to take on Pale Fire, to add another layer of commentary to Nabokov’s already dense puzzle box of a book, is probably the toughest assignment I gave in this project. But she’s an avid reader and a strong lyricist and I know she’ll knock our socks off.

Posted in Songs about Books | 2 Comments

Free Album of the Day: Friends for Heroes – Year in a Costume

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Levi Fuller

[As we all know, the old music business models have pretty much gone out the window, and some amazingly talented artists are giving their stuff away for free. We’ll use these occasional (not actually daily) posts to highlight some of this bounty.]

Friends for Heroes – Year in a Costume (2003)
(Free download at Bandcamp)

I still like to pretend I’m kind of new here in Seattle, and then I stop and think something like “Hey, remember Friends for Heroes? They were pretty good, I wonder what happened to them?” and it turns out their album Year in a Costume came out over 7 years ago, and they haven’t been a band in years. I’m not a fan of saccharine pop music, but this mostly electronic duo, composed of Josh Ottum and Brendan Bosworth, managed to balance clean production and pop hooks with a certain wry intelligence – at times reminiscent of Arto Lindsay, a longstanding favorite artist of mine – resulting in compelling pop music that didn’t leave a weird aftertaste. But hey, don’t take my word for it – this one’s free, go download it now!

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NEO

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Andrea Maxand

Once upon a time, there was this band called Eureka Farm.

And then (in the way of bands) there was no more Eureka Farm. But one half of Eureka Farm formed another band, named, simply: Neo.

I loved Eureka Farm. I used to see them live, “back in the day” (as they say) in Bellingham, WA. I watched them play in Seattle too.

I hate to write about music. I hate to describe music in writing. So all I can say is: Eureka Farm was not like any band I have ever heard live. They left behind two records, and they are not like any other records I’ve ever heard.

The same can be said for another band, Neo, which left behind only one record, Space Country, which I think describes their sound better than anything I can write. Still. I want to talk about the experience of seeing Neo play live.

Continue reading →

Posted in Bands You Should Know | 7 Comments

Living, Breathing String Quartet: OdeonQuartet at the Chapel Tonight

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Caitlin Sherman

If your New Year’s Resolution wasn’t to see a live string quartet performance, it probably should have been.

Oh, how often I’ve heard someone proclaim that they ‘love’ string quartets. An adoration that’s usually sprung from the genius arranging of “Eleanor Rigby” or the unsettling repetition of Clint Mansell’s “Lux Aeterna” (the theme from Requiem for a Dream), or at the very least a guilty pleasure along the lines of metal-gone-chamber music, Apocalyptica (you know who you are). But I very rarely hear about anyone actually going out and seeing a live string quartet perform. If you count yourself among those uninitiated in the ways of live chamber music, a question: what are you waiting for? Seriously. It’s long overdue. A live string quartet is its own living being, its heart pounding, its voice soothing one moment and growling the next. The string instruments have the eerie ability to sing in the register of a person and wrench a variety of emotions using their wide range of articulations.

Lucky for you: your first chance to experience a live string quartet is tonight at the Chapel Performance Space, as Seattle’s OdeonQuartet presents “Vintage Firsts.” Double lucky for you: the program includes Bartok’s String Quartet No. 1 in all it angular, distorted beauty. Next up is Beethoven. This guy practically wrote the book on string quartets. You’ll get to hear the first of his middle period quartets, where things really start to get interesting. And look! Something more contemporary and local: Kam Morrill’s 1988 String Quartet No. 1 will end the program. It’s a $5-$15 sliding scale, 7:30pm.

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Songs about Books

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Levi Fuller

I was recently fortunate enough to receive a grant from the CityArtist program of the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs.  This grant will go towards a project that I came up with that I am calling “Songs about Books.”  Put quite simply, the idea of Songs about Books is to get five different songwriters (myself included) to write sets of songs about five different books (one book each).

In devising this project, I thought it important that an unaffiliated party, well-versed in both literature and local music, be the one to assign each of us our books.  As luck would have it, we in Seattle are very fortunate to have just such a person in our midst: The Stranger‘s Books Editor, Paul Constant, was the natural pick.  I approached him to ask if he would fill this role, and he very graciously accepted.

After a painstaking process of deliberation, I picked Ryan Barrett (The Pica Beats), Alex Guy (Led to Sea), Johanna Kunin (Bright Archer), and Joshua Morrison to be my fellow songwriters on this project.  I’ve been lucky enough to have music by each of them on Ball of Wax over the years, and I think the five of us together will make for a lively, diverse offering.

So now we have our group.  How will this thing actually work?  Paul has interviewed all of the songwriters about music and books – what we think about them, how we approach them, what we like, what we don’t like.  Once he got answers from us and meditated on them appropriately, he then assigned us each a different book.  I told him that he had carte blanche on what kinds of books to assign: they could be novels, non-fiction, essays, poetry . . . anything at all. We’ll announce the books selected and who got them soon, but it’s a very interesting group.

Now that we’ve gotten our assignments, we will take our books and read them, of course.  Following that, each of us will write five songs inspired by our book, and choose three of those to record.  The resulting 15 recorded songs will comprise Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly Volume 25 (Summer 2011), which will be released with a performance on August 19th at the Fremont Abbey.  At the show you’ll get to hear all 25 songs that resulted from this project, and take home the 15-song CD to listen to and cherish forever.

All of this – the songwriting, the recording, the CD production – will be supported by funds very generously granted by the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs.  We are incredibly lucky to live in a city that realizes that the arts have value and is willing to pay artists to create new work.  Thanks to the OACA for their support, to the songwriters for their sense of adventure, and to Paul for generously donating his time and energy to the cause.

Paul and I (and, I hope, some of the other songwriters) will be posting about our experiences with this project here on the blog as Songs about Books progresses, so make sure to check back from time to time for behind the scenes details and updates.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Songs about Books | 1 Comment

Ball of Wax 23 release show: 2/16/11 at the Sunset

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Levi Fuller

Ball of Wax Volume 23 Release show
with Man Rockwell, Sip’s Odyssey, Fox and the Law,
Seth Howard, The Bore Tide
Wednesday, February 16th, 9:30 p.m.
The Sunset Tavern, 5433 Ballard Ave. NW
$7 (includes a free copy of the Ball of Wax 23 CD)

I’m very pleased to announce the lineup of the next Ball of Wax release show. Four out of five of these artists have never played a Ball of Wax show before, and in fact this new volume of Ball of Wax has a lot of newcomers to the BoW fold, which is always exciting. There’s new music from Seattle (the abovementioned bands, as well as Jose Bold, Cahalen Morrison and Eli West, and others), the East Coast (The Brian Michael Roff Catastrophe, The Magic of Multiples), Europe and the UK (Ainara LeGardon, The Savings and Loan, Trips and Falls), and more. It all adds up to 18 tracks of excellent new music, handpicked for your ears.

See you on the 16th!

Posted in Ball of Wax | 1 Comment

Album Review: Wesafari – Sea Survivors

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Levi Fuller

Wesafari – Sea Survivors
(2010, self-released)

How does one write objectively about an album that one has been anticipating for several years, created by one’s friends (and in which one even makes a tiny cameo appearance)? One starts, I suppose, by ditching the third person and any appearance of objectivity and gushing.  So here I gush:

Continue reading →

Posted in Album Reviews, Recorded Music | 1 Comment

Introduction

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Andrea Maxand

Well gosh.

So far this has been a year of people asking me to do stuff that is awesome. At some point I’m going to have to say “no.” But right now, I’m just saying yes. To everything.

So I like to write; I can’t really help myself. To be asked to be part of a blog community was not only an honor, it was a welcome excuse to do something I secretly feel terribly guilty about.

So yay, Blog of Wax!

Mission: to write about music most people don’t ever hear.

I have a lot of friends in bands who write phenomenal music that most people will never hear. But I’m not going to write about their music in a forum like this. The reason: I don’t really want to become that person bands hope/want/expect will give a nice write up of their band. I’m not that person now. I don’t know whether I could become that person or not. But the point is, I don’t ever want to become that person. Period.

I want to be the person who disappears in a record/band/live show/moment and who doesn’t come up for weeks, months, or years; that person you point and laugh at because they love a record so much, it’s embarrassing.

So I will only write about: 1) bands I love that no longer exist; 2) bands I love that don’t exist anywhere near this music scene, and who aren’t really seeking my gushing approval of their band, (because like, I don’t count); and 3) (if Levi will let me) bands on major labels who don’t need me to write them up, but who maybe people in Seattle don’t listen to because maybe people in Seattle think they’re too cool/hip/indie/what-the-fark-ever to listen to them, but bands who are just STUPENDOUS, nevertheless.

So I’m honored to be here, and I’m ornery.

YUP.

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