Tag Archives: Jenn Walker

Humbly Rock ‘n’ Roll

Humble Wolf amp up the riffage on their forthcoming album, Black and White

If you see some of the latest band photos of Humble Wolf, you might be slightly intimidated. They’re all wearing sunglasses and have immaculate rock ‘n’ roll hair.

But it’s not long before bassist David Albertson humbly says, “We’re all nerdy musicians, you know… What you see is what you get.”

Perhaps he means nerdy in the sense that he and the band’s lead man Jayson Angove have software engineering backgrounds, and that drummer Jesse Sherwood is an IT guy. After all, Angove was instrumental in troubleshooting Skype so that he and Albertson could video chat with Submerge.

Or, perhaps it’s because the Roseville-based band, comprised of Angove on vocals, guitar and keys, Chris Winger on backing vocals and guitar, Albertson on bass and Sherwood (Kit Coda) on drums, spent the last two years laboriously perfecting their latest album Black and White side-by-side with their engineer and producer Sean Stack.

“I think I speak for everybody in the band when I say we take pride in our craft,” Angove says. “It’s two years of hard work finally coming to an end, where we can finally show people what we’ve been working on for so long.”

They will have the opportunity to do so at their CD release show at the Shady Lady in mid-January.

The album was recorded at Fat Cat Recording Studio in Sacramento, and it is an intentional move away from the more pop feel of Paper Thin, the last Humble Wolf record, and a step closer to rock ‘n’ roll.

Paper Thin is really more on the mellow side,” Angove reflects. “I would say it’s more easy listening.”

“I’d probably say we’re like the Foo Fighters meets the Black Keys for this new record,” Albertson adds.

It’s any band’s hope to meet a funding goal via crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, and it’s any band’s fantasy to exceed it. Humble Wolf did. In fact, that’s how the band funded the completion of Black and White. Just a month after they posted their funding campaign in July, they exceeded the pledged amount by $270.

“It kind of spread around like wildfire,” Angove says. “I can’t express enough gratitude for how much it helped.”

Thanks to the extra cash, the band could finish mixing and mastering the album and get more physical copies made. They also could make up T-shirts, posters and custom sunglasses to give to their funding backers and to sell as merch at upcoming shows.

Black and White is solidly rock ‘n’ roll, featuring Winger’s rocking guitar solos, with the occasional tastes of indie folk, like the song “9 a.m.” The song that perhaps shows off the band’s strengths the most, however, is “Through the Walls,” Angove and Albertson agree.

“This Should Scare You” is arguably the dominant song on the record, and a searing critique of mainstream culture. Angove’s vocals ride a simple guitar riff before cutting into a bridge where he resentfully sings, “There are too many ‘I’s in this generation/They are blind to the world around them/Their minds are starving and their hearts are empty/I am sick that I am a part of you.”

By definition, these guys are full-time musicians. They’ve played in various projects together. Currently, Angove, Winger and Albertson are in the cover rock band Guitar Head, and Angove also plays with local singer Rebecca Peters, a project that Albertson was formerly a part of. Angove, Winger and Albertson teach private music lessons, and Angove is also a recording engineer at One Eleven Studios in Roseville.

As far as Humble Wolf goes, the band’s beginnings go back to 2010. The name was originally for Angove’s solo recording project. He completed his first recording, Never Mind This Resistance (no longer available), in his apartment with Albertson and a few friends before he moved to Australia.

He moved back home a year later. Paper Thin came next, which mostly featured Angove playing. That was recorded in about 10 days.

Angove had already known Winger and Albertson for years, since middle school. They all grew up listening to a lot of classic rock, and eventually decided it was time to start playing music together. Sherwood came into the picture later on, after he met the three at a drum-off at Guitar Center.

Since they’ve become a four-piece band, they’ve played all over town, including Concerts in the Park, Tap Folsom and the California Brewers Festival.

This year is looking good for the band already. Not only do they have lots of shows lined up, they’re aiming for tours throughout the spring and summer with plans to hit Portland and Eugene, Oregon, in April. They’re hoping to play the Knitting Factory in Reno, SXSW and Outside Lands.

And, they are working on new material, at least 10 to 15 songs’ worth, that they hope to release this summer. Save your ears for that.

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How has it been being a band in Roseville, or forming a band in Roseville?
David Albertson: The suburbs are fairly involved in Sacramento all the time because it’s not that far. We do have a good following, and we play a lot of places locally in Roseville, like Bar 101 and the Trocadero Club. But we also play at Harlow’s, the Shady Lady and Ace of Spades. We play in Sacramento pretty regularly. It’s just this big melting pot; there’s a big scene… I think if anything it kind of helps to work our way into the city.

Which song or songs would you say were most difficult to record and why?
DA: When we go into the studio, all the songs have been worked out… The mix, I think that’s what we spend the most time on… It’s probably the most challenging thing when you’re blending all the different instruments and recording takes.
Jayson Angove: I often say that Sean Stack is the fifth member of Humble Wolf because he takes great care, and he really makes us sound fantastic.

Rewording that question, which songs were most difficult to write?
JA: I definitely have a philosophy to not write overly complicated music. It’s not that we’re unable to do that, it’s just that when we play a show, we want to put on a show, too. If you’re playing something that’s technically demanding, you’re going to spend a lot more time focusing on your playing, and it’s harder to move around and be energetic when you’re just shredding away on your instrument. It’s more fun to have a song that’s not overly complicated, that’s enjoyable to play, so you can move around and put on more of a show.

How did you come up with the lyrics for “This Should Scare You?”
JA: I’ve worked a lot of retail and a lot of minimum wage jobs, and I like to read a lot about what’s happening in the country. There was a report that was released recently about how many hours you would actually have to work a week on minimum wage to actually meet livable standards. And it was something like, in no state working 40 hours a week would you actually support yourself on minimum wage. It was more like 80 to 100 hours a week was more realistic. Also, a lot of people don’t really talk about what’s happening. Or, if they do, they don’t actually do anything about it, they just talk about it, accept it as though it’s kind of how it is, and just let it happen that way. I wish people would pay more attention.

Are you guys the same offstage as you are onstage, or do you have a Humble Wolf persona?
DA: We’re all nerdy musicians, you know? I think the music’s pretty honest. We don’t wear spandex. What you see is what you get, which is what I think people grasp, what they like to see. I don’t think any of us have any Axl Rose personas going on or anything like that.

But you guys do look pretty rock n’ roll in your profile pictures.
JA: Well I appreciate that. I try to be as rock n’ roll as I can all the time!

Check out Humble Wolf’s album release party for Black and White at Shady Lady in Sacramento on Jan. 16, 2015. Check out Shadyladybar.com for more details, or hit up the band on Facebook (Humblewolfmusic).

West Coast Love

ALO’s guitarist speaks up about Tour D’Amour and all things music

When the guitarist of California-based jam band Animal Liberation Orchestra (ALO) answers the phone, he is in the middle of teaching his 5-year-old daughter how to ride a bike in Bernal Heights, his neighborhood in San Francisco.

“I’m trying to teach her that she has to be OK with falls,” Dan Lebowitz explains. “It’s sort of like music.”

If there is any band that knows about perseverance, ALO must be one of them. Three of four members have been playing music together for more than 20 years, since junior high.

Six minutes into the phone conversation with Lebowitz, there is some commotion. A small voice lets out a yell.

“Can I call you back?” he asks apologetically.

Someone might not be OK with falls just yet.

He calls back about 20 minutes later, and the conversation quickly picks up where it left off.

Lebowitz just got home the day before from playing the Jam Cruise Festival in Florida with ALO’s bassist Steve Adams and drummer Dave Brogan in their side project Brokedown in Bakersfield.

Soon, the three, along with ALO keyboardist/vocalist Zach Gill, will be on the road again for Tour D’Amour, ALO’s annual trek along the West Coast, which is in its ninth running year. What started out as a tour that just happened to fall on Valentine’s Day has since evolved into a tradition, and now the band donates their proceeds to school music programs. This year’s proceeds will go to the San Francisco Creative Arts Charter School.

In the years since the band rebranded themselves as ALO, they have been just as likely to tour internationally as they have been to get caught playing a show at the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California. In recent years, they’ve played the likes of Bonnaroo and SXSW. When they played the latter in 2012, Rolling Stone deemed them a “SXSW 2012 Can’t-Miss Act.” Last summer, they toured with Jack Johnson, a close friend of the band (Gill has been best friends with Johnson since their college days at UC Santa Barbara). ALO even has a following in Japan.

But touring the West Coast is a whole different experience, Lebowitz says.
“Special things happen on the West Coast,” he continues. “We feel at home. We feel a certain freedom with these crowds.”

Tour D’ Amour will kick off at the Troubadour in West Hollywood and end with three separate shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Joined by folk bands Fruition and T-Sisters along the way, they will also make a stop at Harlow’s in Midtown and at Main Stage Theater in Grass Valley.

To date, the band is in seven albums deep. The last four were pressed by Brushfire Records, Johnson’s label.

Regardless of whether you’re into jam bands or not, take your pick of any ALO album; it will squash even the subtlest onsets of the mopes. Exploring different sounds together, whether it be rock n’ roll, pop, funk or different instruments, ALO’s instrumentation and songwriting remains refreshingly upbeat, soulful and smooth.

For instance, Lebowitz introduced the pedal steel guitar on the band’s 2010 release Man of the World. A musician who assures that if he could no longer be in a band, he would make guitars, Lebowitz was a luthier’s apprentice after graduating from UC San Diego. It’s an instrument that he is especially fond of.

“You know how they have those pictures of heaven of angels with harps?” he asks. “In my heaven, they play the pedal steel.”

Another voice chimes in on the other end of the line.

“They play lollipops!” his daughter adds.

Now, ALO’s eighth album, which will also be released on Brushfire, is currently in the works. The band already has a studio booked for next month to start recording.

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“This is a very exciting time for us,” Lebowitz says. “The album will be a snapshot of where we are right now.”

Of course, they intend to introduce some of their newest songs to the stage during Tour D’Amour.

Rewind more than 25 years ago, and Lebowitz, Adams and Gill were performing together on stage for the first time. That’s when they signed up to play what they thought was their middle school’s talent show in the cafeteria.

“We wanted to play the tunes everyone was listening to,” Lebowitz recalls. “We wanted to play the parties.”

Unbeknownst to them, the school alternated between putting on a talent show and a musical each year, and that year they were putting on a musical.

Not wanting to disappoint these boys who showed up prepared with instruments and a set list, whoever was running the show agreed that the boys could play their set during the intermission if, in exchange, they performed as extras in the musical. It was The Saga of Dead Dog Gulch, an obscure Western operetta written just for schools.

“It worked out great!” Lebowitz remembers.

By the time intermission rolled around, they had already been onstage an hour, and any onstage anxiety they had had vanished. They pulled their costumes halfway down in an effort to look cool and played their set, including “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures, “Centerfold” by J. Geils Band, and “Get Off of My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones.

Somewhere, there is VHS footage of the whole thing.

The friends have been playing music together ever since. By high school, they were covering Pearl Jam, Radiohead and Steve Miller Band.

It wasn’t long before they were going by the band name Django and writing and performing their own songs. In 1996, Brogan joined the group. That summer, the band members, being college kids without a need for much money, took off for a road trip to Georgia. One thing led to another, and the next thing they knew, they were jamming in the company of the James Brown Band.

“We got to know James Brown a bit,” Lebowitz says casually. “It was really cool.”

By 1998, they were playing music as the newly named ALO.

Without a doubt, the band members credit public schools for their musical education, which is what inspired the band to make Tour D’Amour a benefit for music education.

“That stuff is getting cut left and right,” Lebowitz points out.

Since their own early beginnings, when it comes to playing live shows, ALO’s spirit hasn’t changed, he says.

What does change from show to show, he adds, is their performance. Sometimes they improvise. Songs may end up longer than the recorded versions when they play live. They don’t hesitate to take their time when it feels right to do so.

“We do whatever feels right at the moment,” Lebowitz says. “When we’re feeling inspired, we dig deeper into it. Nothing’s off limits.”

Especially when it comes to touring the West Coast.

See ALO live in Sacramento at Harlow’s on Feb. 19, 2015. They will also be performing at Main Stage Theater in Grass Valley the following night on Feb. 20, 2015. Don’t forget, proceeds from ALO’s Tour D’Amour will help keep music in schools! Get your tickets at Harlows.com or at Thecenterforthearts.org. Doors open for both shows at 7 p.m.

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Cinephile Meets Francophile

The Magnifique World of the Sacramento French Film Festival

Romance between a philosophy professor and a hairdresser, or a 60-year-old dentist and a computer instructor half her age; a 60-year-old former beauty queen who hits the road for an epic road trip; and a judge who finds out not only is she pregnant, but that the father is a murder suspect—you can expect a lot of the unexpected at the 2014 French Film Festival, now in its 13th year and happening June 20 – 29 at the Crest Theatre. The films in this year’s celebration of French cinema explore subject matter ranging from adolescence and young pregnancy to mental illness, self-discovery, and, of course, love.

According to Cecile Mouette Downs, the festival’s executive and artistic director, this year’s selection is one of the strongest yet, and includes 12 of the most acclaimed and awarded premiere films, as well as three classics: the 1970 fairy tale film Donkey Skin (Peau D’Ane), the 1994 historical drama Queen Margot (La Reine Margot), and the 1942 comedy thriller The Murderer Lives At Number 21 (L’Assasin Habite Au 21).

There will also be a screening of short films (complete with petit déjeuner, aka a French breakfast), as well as two late-night films—an erotic thriller and a horror film, both of which have gained high-caliber reputations in their respective genres.

French cinema fans will recognize names like Audrey Tautou, Romain Duris, Juliette Binoche and Roman Polanski. To top it off, Laetitia Dosch, the star of the film Age of Panic, is rumored to be attending the festival and presenting the film on the first weekend (June 20-22).

We’ve highlighted a few films featured in this year’s festival.

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Inside (À l’intérieur)

2007 | Horror
Saturday, June 28 • 11:45 p.m.

Considered one of the scariest, most gruesome French horror films out there right now, À l’intérieur features the rare female killer. The plot is a morbid one. While a pregnant widow is waiting for a ride to the hospital from her mother so doctors can induce labor, a mystery woman (a frightening Beatrice Dalle) shows up at the door with plans to perform the procedure herself and take the baby. Critics give À l’intérieur an 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, waxing poetic about what a “damn good” horror film it is, and even toying with the thought of labeling it a classic. “Leave it to the French to make Suspiria look like a ‘30s drawing-room comedy,” one critic commented, referencing the Italian cult classic that has made numerous Greatest Horror Films of All Time lists. If you fancy scissors and guts in your horror movies, this is a not-to-miss.

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Chinese Puzzle (Casse Tete Chinois)

2013 | Romantic Comedy
Sunday, June 29 • 3:15 p.m.

Calling all Audrey Tautou fans! Here is yet another film to settle your fix, taking place this time in New York City’s Chinatown. This romantic comedy concerns Xavier (Romain Duris), a writer who may just need a little amour to clear up a bad case of writer’s block after the mother of his children moves from Paris to New York, taking their children with her. To be closer to his kids, Xavier follows suit and winds up living in Chinatown. Suddenly Xavier finds himself in the company of a former roommate and a former lover. “I came to New York to be near my kids, who I had with a Brit, who I lived with for 10 years. I had a baby with two lesbians. I married a Chinese woman to become an American. And life’s not complicated?” Xavier asks in a poignant scene. Casse Tete Chinois is, in fact, a follow-up to Cedric Klapisch’s films L’Auberge Espagnole and Russian Dolls, which follow the same characters. (No, you don’t need to see the previous films in order to follow this story line.)

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Queen Margot (La Reine Margot) 

1994 | Historical Drama
Saturday, June 21 • 3:45 p.m.

Considered a timeless classic, La Reine Margot is a (very) ‘90s adaptation of the historical novel written in 1845 by Alexandre Dumas. It traces the life of Margaret of France, aka Marguerite de France or Marguerite de Valois, a Catholic who reigned as France’s queen during the 16th and 17th centuries. From poisonings to beheadings, this true story is anything but a happy one, recreating the bloodstained history of France during the battle between Catholics and Protestants for political power—notably the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Entangled in the plot is Margaret’s personal life, starting with her arranged marriage to Henri de Bourbon, the king of Navarre and a Protestant, in order to make peace between the Protestants and Catholics, which is (of course) followed by a love affair with the soldier La Mole. This movie won the Jury Prize and Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as five César Awards. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, SFFF will present the digitally restored director’s cut of this film, honoring the film’s maker and stage director Patrice Chéreau, who passed away last year.

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Attila Marcel

2013 | Musical Comedy
Saturday, June 21 • 7:05 p.m.
Sunday, June 22 • 3:40 p.m.

Some of the best movies are those that walk the line between reality and a dreamlike world sprinkled with oddities and hints of old Paris. Attila Marcel smacks of a magical realism that is found in French films like Amelie. “It’s not Lord of the Rings, it’s not a totally fantastic universe,” says leading actress Anne Le Ny. Attila Marcel is about a dreamy young pianist who became mute after his parents died in a mysterious accident when he was just two. Suspecting his father was violent with his mother, he suppresses his emotions and treats his parents’ deaths as a dark secret. This suppression makes him a bit childlike. Things take a sudden turn when he meets one of his neighbors, a strange woman (Ny) whose home is overrun with vegetable plants. She is rough, tough, outspoken, very eccentric and connected to nature, Ny says of her character. Directed by Sylvain Chomet, who also directed the 2010 animated drama The Illusionist (L’illusionniste), this film is about self-discovery.

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Camille Claudel 1915 

2013 | Biopic Drama
Sunday, June 22 • 6 p.m.

Camille Claudel 1915 tells the true story of Camille Claudel, the renowned French sculptor and artist who became the protégé, mistress, and muse to Auguste Rodin (another renowned French sculptor). Around the age of 50, Camille (played by award-winning Juliette Binoche) is admitted into an insane asylum at the urging of her brother, the poet, playwright, and diplomat Paul Claudel. The film traces Camille’s despair, convinced that she is not insane and constantly awaiting visits from her brother with hopes he will take her away from the asylum. The story is based on the letters exchanged between Camille and her brother throughout her years spent there. Camille Claudel 1915 tells Camille’s story in a strikingly raw and emotional way. In fact, the film itself was directed in an asylum in France, using its doctors, nurses, and patients as supporting cast members.

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Stranger By The Lake (L’Inconnu Du Lac)

2013 | Erotic Thriller
Saturday, June 21 • 11:35 p.m.

Sometimes, it seems we humans are blindly attracted to what’s in our worst interest. Exploring that concept, L’Inconnu Du Lac takes place on a lakeshore in southern France frequented by gay nudists. The beach also serves as a favorite hangout for the main character Franck, a thirty-something handsome gay male who is constantly scouting the shoreline during the summer. On one afternoon, he meets and is immediately attracted to Michel. The next day, from behind the trees, Franck sees Michel murdering a lover in the lake. Blinded by passion, despite what he secretly knows, Franck is even more infatuated with the killer and seeks a relationship with him, even after police begin an investigation into the death. The film received a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, four stars from Michal Oleszczyk on RogerEbert.com, eight César nominations this year (including Best Film and Best Director) and is praised by critics as a sexy and arresting erotic thriller.

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Turning Tide (En Solitaire)

2013 | Adventure, Drama
Sunday, June 29 • 8:05 p.m.

This film tells the story of sailor Yann Kermadec (played by François Cluzet), who replaces his sailing cohort in the Vendée Globe. Yann’s prospects of winning the three-month round-the-world yacht race are looking good, until he discovers he’s not alone on the ride. Somehow a teenage stowaway managed to sneak onto the boat when Yann landed on the Canary Islands to repair a damaged rudder. Since the Vendée Globe is a solo race, having a passenger onboard immediately disqualifies Yann. Lacking options, Yann has no choice but to share his journey with his unexpected guest. In doing so, he also has a change of heart. A debut for French cinematographer Christophe Offenstein in a directorial role, this film recreates the harshness of international sailing competitions while revealing the spectacular views and extreme conditions of the untamed sea.

The Sacramento French Film Festival runs June 20 – 29, 2014 at the Crest Theatre. Opening night reception begins at 6 p.m., June 20. There are a variety of ticket prices and passes available; visit Sacramentofrenchfilmfestival.org for more info.

Riding A Wave of Nostalgia: Scott Hansen of Tycho hits his stride on his latest album

Scott Hansen of Tycho hits his stride on his latest album

If you could bend time in your hand, watch life play out through a kaleidoscope, or travel through space, it might sound like a song from Awake, Tycho’s latest album released in March. If you want to simply ride a wave of nostalgia, perhaps losing yourself in a sunrise or a long drive down a twisting road, feeling the sensations of both sadness and bliss, then Awake is your album.

“Awake,” the opening track of the album, is one of those lovely, anthemic, synth-heavy songs you never want to end. It’s airy, warm, repetitive and strangely familiar. It washes over you and draws on your heartstrings.

When I spoke to the San Francisco-based frontman of the electronic post-rock outfit, Scott Hansen, to better understand the album, he was frantically fielding my phone call and several other media calls within a half-hour.

Never have I conducted such a butchered interview. Stationed in Chicago for a show at the Concord Music Hall that night, Hansen managed to squeeze in this interview early that afternoon.

On at least three separate occasions, though, he would have to switch over to another line.

“I thought we only had two of these things, and people just kept calling,” he said apologetically before answering yet another call.

Most likely, his other interviews had been postponed because of the band’s Iowa shakedown days before, he later explained. First, they were stopped and searched by troopers alongside a cornfield, drug dog and all (their tour van looked identical to a trailer that had been busted for 75 pounds of weed several months prior). Then their trailer wheel broke. They barely made it to Minneapolis before show time, and were onstage only 15 minutes late.

Yet another talent originally from Sacramento, Tycho is deserving of all said publicity. While he’s had a later start than some musicians, Hansen has been writing and recording music solo for more than 10 years as Tycho (the project was named after the 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe). This was after Hansen dropped out of art school at the University of San Francisco, spending his early 20s successfully building a name for himself as a freelance graphic designer under the pseudonym ISO50, designing anything from album art and posters to magazine covers and snowboards.

Hansen dabbled in music all the while, but it wasn’t until a serious injury took him away from work for two months at age 24, that, for the first time, he could focus all of his energy on just writing music.

“I think it was just about getting to a point skill-wise where I felt like I could create the music I was hearing in my head,” he recalls.

Shortly thereafter, he self-released his first EP, The Science of Patterns, in 2002. Two years later, he followed that up with his first full-length, Sunrise Projector. In 2011, Hansen released his second LP, Dive, on the indie record label Ghostly International, gaining attention from the likes of BBC music, Pitchfork and SPIN. Now, with the release of Awake, his second LP for Ghostly, Hansen is on tour as Tycho the band, accompanied by guitarist/bassist Zac Brown and drummer Rory O’Connor.

Awake, Hansen says, is the first “true Tycho album.”

It’s Tycho’s first cohesive body of work, he later explains. The album cover, which is, of course, designed by Hansen, reflects this. It is simple and elegant, with nothing more than a multicolored, striped orb on the front. It’s meant to be flag-like, Hansen says. The orb represents an iconic sun; it is a consistent motif in Tycho designs. Each of the eight color bands, or stripes, appearing on the orb on the Awake album cover represents a track on the album.

To create the album, Hansen and Brown moved Hansen’s studio to a cabin in Lake Tahoe last winter. From there, they relocated to Santa Cruz, where they met up with O’Connor to integrate the drums.

“I definitely think Tahoe had a lot to do with the sound,” Hansen says in retrospect. “It’s this sort of insulated, isolated space, and I think that had a lot to do with the stuff that came out.”

In the following excerpts, Hansen further discusses the album and what drew him to writing music in the first place.

I think you mentioned on your blog and elsewhere that you kind of define this as the first true Tycho album. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, I mean, that’s not to diminish any of the other records; I’m proud of those. But I felt like those were more of an education and learning process for me as a producer. There were a lot of ideas and things I wanted to do with this record that I wasn’t able to accomplish on my own, with my own skill set and my own resources. So this time around, I worked with Zac Brown. He was on a couple songs on Dive. Then we brought in Rory O’Connor as a drummer for the live tour, for Dive. During that time, I felt like everything meshed, and I wanted to capture that for this record. Basically, all of the things that I had been envisioning for all these years started coming together in a live show. So, this was the first record I felt like the whole vision came together and crystallized as a fully realized idea.

Are there one or two examples you can give of things that you wanted to accomplish with this album that you couldn’t accomplish in the past?
Definitely the rhythm section. I think you just make a different kind of music when you’re sitting by yourself and just layering tracks than when you have three people in a room working off of each other and moving and reacting and all that. It was different in a lot of ways; it was more visceral and more on the fly, and that led to arrangements that I think were more focused and had more movement and dynamics.

So you had worked first with Zac in Tahoe and then with Rory in Santa Cruz?
Yeah, so we decided we wanted to do this more in a traditional way, where we went and took this specific period as an intensive time for writing and creating, as opposed to my other records, which were compilations of ideas I had been working with over a period of years. So we decided to remove ourselves from my studio and the city… So we just tore up the studio and reset it up in a small cabin up [in Tahoe] and spent a few weeks hashing everything out. I came back, worked on that stuff for a while, and then we met up with Rory in Santa Cruz. That’s where all the arrangements came together. Then I went back, did some more work, and we all met up in San Francisco in another studio and finished everything off.

So you go by the moniker Tycho, after Tycho Brahe. Why?
I came across his name a lot during the years I was studying a lot of astronomy-related stuff. I wanted a name that didn’t have any loaded meaning.

You had that window of time [when you were injured] when you started to put some music together for Science of Patterns. But at what point had you developed a music background, or an interest in playing music? Had it been a long time coming?
No not at all. I had been messing around with things for, I’d say, two years prior to that. But before that I had zero musical experience, which I always thought was kind of weird. I just never had that moment; it was never presented to me in the right context. I’m a very technically oriented person. I think I was originally in San Francisco when I started in my second year of college. I got introduced to drum and bass, and then a lot of electronic music for the first time… I had listened to rock and heavy metal, so it never occurred to me how it was made, just because it was taken for granted. But this other stuff, the sounds were so foreign that I was really interested in how it was made, and it just seemed like something I could do, whereas the guitar and drums, for whatever reason, to me seemed a leap for me to be able to learn those things. It seemed so foreign to me. But with the machines, I naturally gravitate toward those things. So that was the entry to the whole thing. But it’s interesting, because later, I started working more and more with traditional instrumentation, and learned guitar, drums and bass, and all that stuff.

See Tycho live in Sacramento at Harlow’s on May 10, 2014. Dusty Brown will also perform. Doors will open at 8 p.m. for a 9 p.m. show. For tickets ($20), go to Tychomusic.com or Harlows.com. UPDATE: This show is currently sold out!

Outdoor Insanity At Its Finest

BANFF Mountain Film Festival comes to Davis

A red dot of a human is dropped off by helicopter at the top of a mountain. The dot then flies at an almost perfectly vertical angle down the side of the mountain on two skis, propelling over cliffs and leaving clouds of snow racing behind. Heli-skiers, paragliders, whitewater kayakers, mountain bikers—one could simply dismiss these people as nut jobs with a death wish. Or, one could argue that these are some of the most vibrant people walking the face of the planet.

Perhaps Ryan Sandes, featured in the short documentary that follows his solo race across a Namibian canyon, The Beauty of the Irrational, says it best: “I think pushing out of that comfort zone makes you realize how lucky and how fortunate we are.”

Whether you’re an adrenaline fiend looking for a quick visual fix to hold you over until your next big adventure, or someone who prefers to live vicariously through others, the BANFF Mountain Film and Book Festival is a not-to-miss. On April 8 and 9, 2014, BANFF will take over Davis’ Rocknasium (as well as Montbleu Theater in South Lake Tahoe on March 31). The majority of the films document individuals’ journeys in extreme sports, in addition to a few environmental documentaries and comedic shorts. A film festival that sprouted from small beginnings in the late ‘70s in Banff, Alberta, BANFF now boasts a collection of more than 5,000 of the world’s best outdoor films and hosts more than 500 screenings worldwide.

The festival features a total of 30 films. Take a look at a few of our summaries below to get a feel for what to expect.

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North of the Sun (Nord for Sola)

46 minutes

Like all good adventures, this one started with a crazy idea. Two young Norwegian guys, Inge Wegge, 25, and Jørn Ranum, 22, decided on a whim that they wanted to build a cabin on an isolated island near the coast of northern Norway and the Arctic Circle, allowing them to spend the nine months of the Norwegian winter skiing and surfing there. They built their tiny hobbit-like cabin out of driftwood and whatever debris they could find on the shore. They got by on little more than expired foods they managed to scrounge up. All of this was worthwhile, though, because on the island, they had access to some of the best waves in the world. Fortunately for us, they decided to document the rich experience. In just under 50 minutes, this film will take you to a cold, cold paradise. Initially released on film in 2012, this documentary won 37 awards.

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Down the Line

22 minutes

Imagine lugging a pack full of climbing gear to a canyon with a descent that is blocked from view, and trusting gravity to take you down without being able to see the bottom. Unlike climbing, canyoneering mostly means a downward descent, starting from the top of a canyon and using climbing gear to rappel down the sides of its walls. In the first film produced by adventure photographer Francois-Xavier De Ruydts, a crew of canyoneering enthusiasts makes its way along Box Canyon Creek in Vancouver. They stumble upon perfect slot canyons, which then lead them to the “mother of all canyons.” “You can creep up to the edge of that and look in, but all you can see is a narrow canyon twisting and turning out of sight,” explains one of the main characters. In roughly 20 minutes, this video will take you through some of Vancouver’s most spectacular slot canyons and waterfalls, which, until this film, had not been captured on film.

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Stand

23 minutes

It seems there is no escape from tar sands these days, even on remote islands. The Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of Alaska, have made news before, including when logger-turned-environmentalist Grant Hadwin cut down the Golden Spruce in 1997 to make a political statement. Sixteen years later, the same region is again in the spotlight in this surf and standup paddleboarding documentary. The film shows what’s at stake if a Calgary-based oil and gas company successfully constructs a 1,170-kilometer tar sands pipeline from Alberta to the west coast of British Columbia, and transports the crude across the ocean to Asia. The crude tankers, carrying approximately 2 million barrels of oil each, would have to pass through the inlets of the Great Bear Rainforest. Should an oil spill occur, these waters and all of their riches would be doomed.

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Spice Girl

24 minutes

It’s obnoxious that the summary for this film introduces its leading character, Hazel Findlay, as a “nice little blonde girl putting all the lads to shame.” If a woman attempts something usually only pursued by men, why can’t she simply be acknowledged for her accomplishment without the stupid commentary? Nonetheless, it’s refreshing that Reel Rock 8 decided to make a film about Findlay, a climber who immerses herself in the United Kingdom’s climbing scene, which is supposedly dominated by machismo. She is the first woman to climb the British grade of E9. The 20-something-year-old learned to rock climb with her father on the sea cliffs of South Wales at age 7, and went on to claim the title of British junior champion six times in indoor competitions. In 2012, she was the first woman to free climb up PreMuir, a route on El Capitan in Yosemite. In this film, she travels with fellow climber Emily Harrington to Morocco to climb some of the best walls it has to offer at the Taghia Gorge. Despite the lame PR, this film has a lot of promise.

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Heaven’s Gate

48 minutes

Carved into the side of Tianmen Mountain, located in China’s Hunan Province, is an approximately 100-foot-wide natural arch. The Chinese believe that the arch is a gateway from Earth to Heaven. Naturally, then, it makes sense to throw on a wingsuit and hurl yourself from a helicopter at 6,000 feet toward the arch, hoping to make it through the hole instead of smashing into the side of the 4,265-foot mountain. In September 2011, professional skydiver, BASE jumper and wingsuit pilot Jeb Corliss did just that. This 48-minute film recaptures Corliss’ experience, from the preflight anticipation—including an interview with Conan O’Brien—to the internationally-televised event that took place in front of a captive audience of nearly 50 billion people.
Most importantly, it includes first-person views from the crown of Corliss’ Red Bull-sponsored helmet.

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FLOW:The Elements of Freeride

3 minutes

Though this film only spans three minutes, who doesn’t want to watch a geophysicist in a button-down shirt fly through the Cascade Mountains on a mountain bike? Meanwhile, small white text identifies everything Rex Flake passes along the way, from sage and ponderosa pines to ants and the surrounding geology, as well as the different velocities he hits. Instead of accompanying each jump with predictable heavy metal or electro music, the soundtrack includes nothing more than Flake’s wheels against the trail, his ticking bike gears and chirping birds.

In the words of FLOW Mountain Bikes, “To absorb the rhythm of nature is the universal ride. A synthesis of rider and mountain, forest and air. Pure style of human exertion through technology within an ancient landscape carpeted with diverse organic life. Freeriding is the differential perception of a rider in flowing symbiosis of these elements.” Ultimately, this short captures the euphoria of descending trails from 3,000 feet on two wheels, in the best way possible.

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Ready to Fly

56 minutes

Women competed in ski jumping for the first time in history at this year’s 2014 Winter Olympics, largely thanks to Lindsey Van. This film tells the story of the 2009 World Champion, along with the Women’s Ski Jumping USA team. The film traces the obstacles Van faced throughout her career, beginning with being told “fat don’t fly” at age 8 by her coaches, followed by a 15-year battle that resulted in a lawsuit against the organizers of the 2010 Olympics, when Van claimed that her rights had been violated because female ski jumpers were not allowed to compete.

“It’s like my future is in the hands of a bunch of old dudes,” she bluntly observed. Then, when the International Olympic Committee reconsidered whether or not women would jump in the 2014 Winter Olympics, Van got word that she was the bone marrow match for a cancer patient. She would have to consider what was more important to her—competing or saving a life. Expect this film to take you on an emotional journey through Van’s experiences as she fights to do what she loves most.

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The Beauty of the Irrational

6 minutes

This six-minute short follows Ryan Sandes, a South African ultrarunner, as he makes another attempt to beat the fastest record time running the Fish River Canyon Hiking Trail in Namibia. It is an 84-kilometer (roughly 52-mile) journey, which typically takes five days for hikers to complete. Aside from a desire to beat the record time, Sandes’ motives are simple: “Generally we always question ourselves, we feel like we always gotta be rational about things instead of actually just doing it for pure enjoyment,” he says. Trailed by a small crew of people who assist him, Sandes beats the 10-hour, 54-minute record with a six-hour, 57-minute finish. As it follows Sandes shuffling down rocks and scaling edges of cliffs at full-speed, the camera drags along, capturing spectacular panoramas of the Namibian landscape. These are sights you will want to see on a big screen.

You’ll have two chances to check out the BANFF Mountain Film and Book Festival. First, you can head on up to an actual mountain on March 31 to the Montbleu Theater at 6 p.m. But if you’d rather stay put in the valley, head to Rocknasium on April 8 and 9. You can purchase tickets to the Rocknasium event by calling (530) 757-2902.

A Thousand Faces, Musically Unraveled

Beats Antique plunges into a hero’s journey during their spring tour

To anyone who has a soft spot for mythology, Joseph Campbell’s monomyth (aka hero’s journey), belly dancing, electronic music, vaudeville or extravagant performance art—check out Beats Antique’s latest album. Better yet, go see them when they perform at Ace of Spades in April for their spring tour.

For those unfamiliar, Beats Antique is a sort of electro, experimental, tribal dance act founded within the creative core of the Bay Area. For the last seven years, the band has continued to birth explosive, beat-heavy albums, each intended to musically accompany the dance performances of Zoe Jakes, the band’s arresting frontwoman. If you’ve ever watched tribal fusion belly dancing, you might have watched it performed to the sounds of Beats Antique.

Now, Beats Antique is bringing Campbell’s epic monomyth to life via two albums. A Thousand Faces, Act I, was just released in fall 2013. A Thousand Faces, Act II will be available by the time their tour starts in late March.

The band used Campbell’s myth map as their guide. As far as conceptualizing the albums goes, “things just made sense,” Jakes says.

And, believe it or not, creating and producing a two-album interpretation of the hero’s journey—and choreographing an entire live performance to go with it—took the band just eight months.

Perhaps that isn’t all that surprising. David Satori, who plays anything from guitar and violin to the saz (a Turkish instrument), graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a degree in music performance and composition. Tommy Cappel, who plays keys, bass and drums in the band, graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston with a degree in studio drumming. Jakes has been dancing since her mom forced her to take ballet at age 3, and picked up tribal fusion belly dancing in 2000. In addition to dancing, she plays the drums and is heavily involved in producing and arranging the band’s music. Performing is what these three know.

The band also pulled several musicians to collaborate with them on the first act, like Indian musician Alam Khan; Bay Area singer/songwriter Lynx; SORNE, of Austin, Texas; Micha and Leighton, of the Yard Dogs Roadshow; and Les Claypool of the Bay Area rock band Primus.

It was a collaborative effort with friends, really.

“We wanted to tip our hat to all those bands,” Satori says.

The band created each song to represent various parts of the hero’s journey.

For instance, “The underworld was very Balinese; it was the perfect thing for bringing a character into the underworld,” Jakes says.

She is referring to the track “Charon’s Crossing,” based on the Greek mythological character Charon. If you ever take a look at Michelangelo’s depiction of Charon in his fresco (mural) at the Sistine Chapel, you will see an intimidating character with a body builder’s physique, bulging eyes, clawed toes, pointy ears and a tuft of gray hair on his head. He is the boatman who ferries souls from the living world to the underworld, for the price of a coin.

“The imagery, and where we were going with it, is: ‘Charon’s Crossing’ is about the shamans asking the gods to take the character to the underworld,” Jakes explains. “This is what ‘Charon’s Crossing’ represents, for us, in the show.”

Though you wouldn’t expect it from a boat ride to Hades, this is arguably the most magical and uplifting song on the record. The song was composed using MIDI, and digitally recreating a gamelan—a set of inseparable Indonesian musical instruments (usually Balinese or Javanese) like xylophones, drums, gongs, chimes, bamboo flutes, metallophones and bowed instruments. It would have been impossible to acquire all these instruments, so the band downloaded samples of each instrument from a sample bank.

“We were fortunate enough to download really good samples,” Satori explains. “In order to get those instruments, it’s a really big production, and they’re really hard to find.”

“We used the traditional orchestra ensemble and the instrumentation of the orchestra, which is up to 40 people,” he adds.

Satori was first introduced to the gamelan-style while he was studying at the arts institute.

Just a song after “Charon’s Crossing” is “Doors of Destiny,” which feels a lot like walking into a nightmarish game show on acid, with a Vaudeville flavor. Of course, the effect is intentional. The game show element represents the multiple tests of the hero’s journey. It’s meant to feel chaotic, Satori says. Think Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum.

“I look at that as sort of where realities are all upside down,” he explains. “Everything’s sort of a game.”

“For the game show, we decided we wanted something that was really hook-y, that had that sort of cheesy circus quality to it,” Jakes adds, “so it made sense that we would bring in some of the elements of that Vaudeville sound.”

For this song, Jakes came up with the choreography before the music was ever made.

Look up the “Doors of Destiny” on YouTube, and you can get an idea of how this song might be executed live. After some theatrics, a young girl gets pulled onto the stage from the front of the crowd, where she remains, side-by-side with Jakes. A massive blow-up creature appears from behind, enveloping the two into chaos.

Live performances are always a unique experience, Jakes says. Ninety percent of the time, the band pulls someone onstage.

“Once in a while, someone is not happy about it,” she adds.

Act I is 10 songs that span just under 50 minutes. It ends right at the middle of the hero’s journey, in the abyss. Here the hero faces his or her darkest fear and greatest challenge.

Their spring tour will cover the entire journey: both acts one and two.

Beats Antique started out as a recording project in 2007. They had no intentions of becoming a full-fledged touring band. Fate, however, had another plan.

The three met in the Bay Area. Jakes and Satori became a couple, and eventually married. Jakes and Cappel were both in the Extra Action Marching Band, which Jakes sums up as crazy performance art, and Yard Dogs Road Show, a troupe of Vaudeville performers.

Meanwhile, Cappel had spent years messing around with electronic and hip-hop music.

“I was just into making beats and having fun,” Cappel recalls. “I didn’t have a goal.”

Eventually, the three had it in their minds to create a belly-dancing album meshing electronic and tribal music. Everything spiraled from there.

“It’s turned into a crazy, wild beast no one can tame,” Satori says.

Catch the spectacle that is Beats Antique live at Ace of Spades in Sacramento on April 2, 2014. The show starts at 6:30 p.m., and tickets are $22. You can purchase them in advance through Aceofspadessac.com.

Getting Biblical

The Devil Makes Three teams up with a country music legend to create their darkest album to date

If The Devil Makes Three was playing music 80 years ago, they would likely be playing saloons with maroon interiors and raucous patrons.

Pete Bernhard, Lucia Turino and Cooper McBean emerged as The Devil Makes Three in Santa Cruz in 2001, after making their way as far west as possible from their hometown in Vermont.

“It was about as far as we would get from Vermont; it seemed like an adventure to us,” Bernhard says. “[California] was somewhere I had been before, but really didn’t know much about.”

Since their beginnings, traveling has been a constant. They bounced around the United States, even landing in Midtown Sacramento and Davis while Turino attended UC Davis. (Bernhard still has a 916 area code, in fact.)

As far as traveling goes, “We really had it in our minds,” Bernhard says. “But the band gave us a reason to do it… We had no idea how much we would end up doing it as a band, but it suited us. It definitely suited us, and I think it still does.”

Along the way, they have mastered a sound that falls somewhere in the realm of jug bands, blues and New Orleans ragtime, playing renowned festivals like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and sharing the stage with the likes of Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris.

With both Bernhard and McBean on banjo and guitar, McBean on the musical saw and Turino on upright bass, it is easy to let your ears take you back in time.

In October they released their fourth studio album, I’m a Stranger Here. Days from now, they will embark on a tour to promote the record, making a stop in Sacramento in early February for the first time in more than three years, Bernhard estimates. The band will play Ace of Spades with The Brothers Comatose on Feb. 7, 2014.

“Harlow’s is the only venue we’ve ever played in Sacramento,” he says. “This is the first time we have played a venue in Sacramento that’s bigger than Harlow’s.”

The last studio album the band released before I’m a Stranger Here was Do Wrong Right in 2009, recorded at a house in Davis, and mixed at the Hangar, Sacramento’s well-known recording studio.

As far as I’m a Stranger Here goes, it is their first studio record that they have not self-produced. Instead, acclaimed country musician and producer Buddy Miller took on the task, after meeting the band through a shared record label and management company.

Miller suggested they record at Easy Eye Sound, Dan Auerbach’s (of the Black Keys) recording studio. In addition to playing on the album himself, Miller also brought on members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, of New Orleans, to perform on the record.

The result? An album that is impossible not to listen to without bouncing or smacking your knee.

“One of the things we’ve always tried to do with our records is capture the feeling we have playing live, and it’s always been a really hard thing to do,” Bernhard says. “I think this record was the most fun to make, of any record we’ve ever made, and I’m hoping, if anything, that that’s transmitted.”

Beneath the thrill of the fiddles and banjos, however, are somewhat dark and sobering words. Though religion has never played much of a role in the members’ lives, biblical themes crop up throughout the album.

“I know this album is definitely a little bit darker than some of our previous records, and that’s just circumstantial, honestly,” Bernhard says. “I didn’t set out to do that necessarily, but as we put the record together, those were the songs that came to the surface as the best ones.”

In “A Moment’s Rest,” he laments “Lord, I got a heart full of hatred, for me there sure ain’t no cure. I wake up and I’m running, I don’t know what I’m running for.”

Simply put, it’s a song about ceaseless dissatisfaction, he explains.

“I think I’m a pretty dissatisfied person, and so are lots of people. It’s just a song about how there isn’t escape from whatever it is that you might not like to think about in life. There’s no way out,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of traveling, we’ve done a lot of playing, we’ve done a lot of drinking, just like anybody trying to, you know, figure out how to get around these things. Ultimately, the song is about how there is no way around these things.

“That’s another thing that keeps me going, as far as being a musician goes, is I’m never satisfied with anything that I do, either,” he adds. “I always think that I could do something better, and I hope that I always could. So, dissatisfaction is a theme in my lyrics, and probably always will be.”

Performing runs in each band member’s blood; all three come from a line of performers. Turino’s parents were dance teachers, and Bernhard and McBean both were surrounded by musicians growing up.

Bernhard and McBean bonded over music early on.

“Both of our families had huge record collections, and I think that’s really where we got our start,” Bernhard says. “When I was 12 years old, my brother gave me all the Willie Dixon recordings, and Howlin’ Wolf, and the complete recordings of Robert Johnson, and a lot of other blues artists that he thought I would like.

“And I love that stuff. That’s still what I love,” he adds.

Even before Devil Makes Three became a band, they were friends first, as far back as high school.

“We’ve always wanted to do this, and we’ve been pretty single-minded about it,” Bernhard says. “And that’s held us together.”

What are you most excited about right now?
I think I’m most excited about this tour we’re about to go on. Well, actually, I’m more excited about our new record that just came out. I’d say that’s probably the thing I’m most excited about. This tour will be the first time we bring the album out to the West Coast. Other than the two shows we did in San Francisco and the two shows we did in Santa Cruz, we haven’t actually toured the West Coast with this record yet.

Regarding I’m a Stranger Here, what prompted that title, because for me that is a familiar feeling.
Us doing what we do, it is a problem that we are strangers everywhere we go. Every day we’re in a different city, and we don’t spend a whole lot of time at a home. It also comes from an old Gus Cannon song.

I think I read that it was Buddy Miller’s idea to go to Dan Auerbach’s studio?
Yeah, it was Buddy’s idea. I had never even heard of Dan’s studio. A lot of good stuff has been recorded there. Dan and Buddy are friends, and he thought it would be a cool place to do it, and that it would have the right feel. And I thought it was perfect, it was a great idea. It was a lot of fun, and we really enjoyed working with the engineer, too.

How long were you guys there?
Not long. I’d say two weeks. We recorded the whole album live, for the most part—all the basic tracks and live vocals—so when we got a good take it was pretty much done. We didn’t take a ton of time in the studio. We spent probably as much time mixing as we did recording.

How did you guys pull the Preservation Hall Jazz Band into playing?
That was Buddy. He played with them before. He suggested it, and I thought it was a great idea, but I had no idea that it could actually happen. He called them up, and we got them on the record. It was amazing. I was really happy that all that came together.

Another thing that I heard on this record was a number of religious references. So why the religious references, and why even did you guys choose Devil Makes Three? Did it just sound cool, or was there anything behind that?
Devil Makes Three was chosen by a friend of ours, actually, when we were all having a big argument about band names. We all agreed upon it, and that’s how we ended up with that name. I guess it did just sound cool, but also there were three of us, and it’s a reference to a song, which, like I said, we like to do that in our songs.

And the sort of biblical references…
Oh yeah. I love gospel music, it’s definitely a big inspiration to me. I listen to a lot of old gospel groups, and I just love their music. A friend of mine in Santa Cruz got me interested in it a long time ago, and I’ve always really loved that kind of music… Also, the Bible is a story that everyone knows. Almost everyone, or it seems like almost everybody, knows part of it in the United States… The stories in the Bible are some of the oldest stories around, and I think it’s an interesting place to draw from in terms of material, and just to sort of try to tell a story within it.

What sort of impact were you hoping to have on your listener, or your listener’s ear, with this album?
Oh, well, I kind of leave that up to the listener, you know what I mean? I think that music is up for interpretation. Whatever impact I hope to have isn’t necessarily going to pan out… People’s interpretation of music is a strange thing. Sometimes people are talking to me about a song, and they’ll say it meant this to them, and I’ll think, “It didn’t mean that to me at all,” but that’s the great thing about music.

The Devil Makes Three show at Ace of Spades has Sold Out. Be sure to check out I’m a Stranger Here at Thedevilmakesthree.com.

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Where Is The Fun In Seriousness?

Local punk trio BOATS! talks about their latest LP and being misunderstood

The guys in local punk band BOATS! could have a future in comedy. It’s difficult to know when they’re being serious, and when they’re just baiting.

During their phone interview with Submerge, they gave us permission to make this whole article up. We didn’t take them up on the offer, so you can keep reading.

When we spoke with two of the three members, the band was prepping for the official release of their LP Black and White (the first LP they have released since Totally Jawsome in 2010), coming up at Café Colonial. It’s been a long time coming. Local musician Ted Angel recorded the album in the back of a boat warehouse in North Sacramento almost two years ago.

“I was in my mid-twenties then,” says BOATS! bassist David Hayden.

“I couldn’t even grow facial hair yet,” adds lead guitarist and singer Matt Leonardo.
Why the delay? They would have put out the album much sooner, except they were waiting almost a year for Adeline Records to “press go.” The record company, which is co-owned by Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, initially expressed interest in releasing the BOATS! LP after hearing a demo, and then backtracked.

“They were into it, and Billy Joe Armstrong reportedly liked it, or liked us (I don’t know if he actually even heard the record),” Leonardo says. “We were talking to them, but they were kind of stringing us along.”

“We really wanted to put out [the LP] with them, so we weren’t really looking for other labels,” he adds. “Then we realized that it wasn’t going to happen.”

After almost a year of holding out, BOATS! released the record through Sonoma label Modern Action Records instead. Black and White will be available on cassettes and vinyl, but if you still do CDs (does anyone?), you are out of luck.

Since their beginning in 2007, when BOATS! surfaced from a previous project called the She He He’s (inspired by Portland’s Clorox Girls), the band has rotated several members. Nowadays, though, BOATS! is solid, consisting of core members Leonardo and Hayden, both 27, and newest addition Adam Jennings, 19, on drums.

All and all, Black and White is no more than 12 minutes of quick and dirty punk songs with silly lyrical jabs, like “Smoking Is Cool.”

“Obviously smoking isn’t cool,” Leonardo says. “But, it’s cool. I don’t know about you, but James Dean is cool. Audrey Hepburn? Cool. The Fonz, I think smokes. He’s cool.”

Then there is the song on the album called “Watch You,” which, Leonardo says isn’t about much of anything except looking into people’s windows as he drives by, just to see what’s going down.

Comedy aside, in all seriousness, these guys claim their love for Sacramento.

“People think that we hate it here,” Leonardo says. “For some reason in Sacramento people just think we’re dicks. And it makes it hard to feel good about yourself at home when everybody says they don’t like you.”

“Sacramento is really big on new bands,” Hayden adds. “We’re no longer a new band, so our 10 minutes is kind of up in the punk rock scene.”

Thus, they tour a lot.

Fortunately, touring is easy for BOATS! these days. Whereas they once toured for two months at a time, broke, now their tours last about two weeks. If a show gets cancelled, it’s not too big a deal, because they don’t spend days driving to get there. Instead of using a tour van, BOATS! will fly to wherever their shows are booked, rent a car and borrow gear from one of the other bands playing the same show.

“Some bands look down on us for doing that, that’s the con,” Hayden says.

Other than occasional flack, there are those rare occasions that make touring rough, like when Hayden got sick during one of the East Coast shows in March.

“I spent most of the night having diarrhea in the shitty bathroom of this punk club,” he candidly recalls.

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How did you guys get into punk music?
Matt Leonardo: I got into punk music because I got tired of listening to metal when I was like, 12. I was really into Slipknot, and I decided that I liked the attitude in punk more than I liked the attitude in metal. But when I was into metal, it was nü-metal like Korn and Slipknot, so it wasn’t really cool metal like Judas Priest. So, yeah, I got into punk that way. I just kept going, I couldn’t stop.

David, what’s your story?
David Hayden: I was just listening to Green Day, forever. I never stopped. And that’s like, the punk-est band you’ll ever come across. [Laughs.]

Alright.
ML: [Laughs.] She’s like, “bullshit.”
DH: I recently got into Good Charlotte, too. I don’t know if that’s like, punk, but…
ML: And that’s not even a joke. He literally got in my car the other day, and he was like, “Let me put on some tunes, I’m really into this band,” and it was Good Charlotte.

It’s hard sometimes to hold down band members. My impression is drummers are even more difficult.
ML: Oh yeah, you gotta have a good drummer. If you have a drummer that sucks, then [the band] would suck. You might as well not have a drummer at all.
DH: We tried out two other drummers before Adam. If we didn’t find Adam we probably would have broke up.

Especially for punk bands, one of the ways to promote shows has been through posters and flyers, but record stores are dropping off the map. So how are you guys promoting your shows?
ML: Mostly Facebook. I actually just deleted my Facebook because of all the cyber bullying that happens. Social media is kind of the new telephone pole, I guess. It kind of sucks, though… The band is still on Facebook, but I’m personally not on Facebook anymore.

What are you releasing the album on?
ML: It’s on vinyl, and then we’ll have it on cassette. We will not release it on CD. We’ve actually never put anything out on CD except for a CD-R when we first started out.

Why is that?
ML: I don’t buy CDs, I don’t know about you, but I don’t go out and look for CDs anymore. I have a six-disc CD changer in my car, and I have six CDs in there, but I never listen to them. I just put six CDs in there when I bought the car and that’s it… If you are going to put this in the article, then I would say: if you bought the record, and then asked for me to email you a digital copy of the record, I would.

What can you tell me about the new LP?
DH: It’s not as catchy as Good Charlotte.
ML: It’s close though, it’s a close second. We like to describe our music as catchy.
DH: Short and catchy: Our songs don’t go past 2 minutes and 50 seconds.
ML: I don’t think there’s a song on the new record that’s longer than a minute and 10 seconds.

I think there was one that was a minute and 30 seconds.
DH: We like to exaggerate. They’re short otherwise.
ML: If we were playing it live we would speed it up to keep it under a minute.

And that’s because…?
ML: I don’t know, when we play live we just get excited and we just play faster. People got things to do, they don’t have time to listen to a band. So you just got to get it out fast.

They’re not there to really get the full experience; they just want it short and sweet, huh?
ML: Yeah, I don’t know about you but I hate going to a show and the band plays for, like, 45 minutes, and you’re like, “Is this song ever gonna end?” And then they play an encore. For us it’s like, alright, let’s do this. Fifteen minutes, then we’ll get out of here and go grab some food.

Your shows aren’t really 15 minutes, are they?
ML: Sometimes. In the beginning we obviously didn’t have that many songs, so it was probably close to 15 minutes. We could probably do a 15-song set in 15 minutes. We usually do like 30 or 40 minutes [now]… We don’t like to dilly-dally; we’re straight to the point.

And it’s always been that way?
ML: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s what we always kind of aimed for. I think it originally started out because I haven’t always been the strongest songwriter, so it’s easy to write a song that’s first chorus, solo, chorus, and that’s it. That’s like, 57 seconds, and that’s the song.
DH: One thing that people either like or hate about us is, we like to talk more than we like to play music.
ML: We should be stand-up comedians.

34-web

Catch these standup guys at their official LP release show Friday, Nov. 29, at Café Colonial. BOATS! will be joined by The Left Hand, The Barfly Effect, and the Phenomenauts. The all-ages show starts at 7:30 and is $10. For more info, visit Facebook.com/boatssacramento.

Boats!-s-Submerge_Mag_Cover

Exploring Sound

The Virgin’s Guide to NorCal NoiseFest 2013
Written by a NoiseFest Virgin

For the 17th year in a row, Sacramento is hosting NorCal NoiseFest. One of the oldest and most established “noise” festivals out there, it is a yearly gathering of performing artists from around the country who base their entire acts around creating noise. There is no false advertising here; we are talking about noise, as in sound intentionally void of rhythm, melody and structure. Dissonance and chaos are sought.

This year’s festival will feature 40 artists, spanning three days and four locations.
Let me just get this out of the way now. I’ve lived in Sacramento for 25 years straight, and I have never been to a NoiseFest. For shame!

Anyway, to gain a better understanding of NoiseFest, I not only reviewed countless videos and tracks by the artists performing in this year’s lineup, but I also spoke with the only two people in town who have performed NoiseFest every year since its birth in 1995, Lob of Instagon and William Burg of Uberkunst. They have also been highly involved members of the Secret Masters of Noise (those who make NoiseFest happen each year) since the early ‘00s.

In sum, think of NorCal NoiseFest as the “outsider experience,” Lob explains. The presentation is meant to be unique, abrasive and unpleasant.

This embrace of noise is not a new idea. Here is a snippet of history to prove it: in 1913 the Italian artist Luigi Russolo wrote the Futurist manifesto “L’arte dei Rumori” or “The Art of Noises.” In it, he argued that because humans’ lives were becoming inundated with machinery, music should incorporate such sounds into composition. You might consider Russolo the founding father of noise music, 100 years ahead of his time. Apropos, this year’s NoiseFest is marking the celebration of a “century of noise.”

Rest assured, NoiseFest doesn’t cater to any one crowd. Sure, noise doesn’t have mass appeal—lots of people haven’t trained their ears for it. Yet there are pockets of noise enthusiasts out there, young and old,
Burg confirms.

Compare noise to eating pancreas, he suggests. The masses will gag at the mere thought, opting for a McDonald’s cheeseburger, just as they will choose to listen to “music” instead of “noise.” Yet there are some who will gladly dig into a plateful of pancreas over a fistful of fries any day.

As he so poetically elaborates, like a mountain man leads the way into the wilderness, the noisemaker blazes a path for other musicians to follow, sometimes decades later.

“Somebody had to go there first, and they generally had to go alone,” he adds.

Consider NorCal NoiseFest the once-a-year gathering of those mountain men and women.

Female-Led Performances

W00dy

W00dy


W00DY is a solo performer hailing from Boston, Mass. She excels at vocal manipulation, particularly stretching and contorting her voice, layering and looping fragments over subtle tones. Her performance may leave you feeling airy, and at other times feeling like you are swallowed in a spiral or a maze. You may be tempted to think she is channeling Bjork at times, minus the music. This will be her first time playing NorCal NoiseFest. Catch her performance on Friday, October 4, 2013 at 10:30 p.m. at Luna’s Cafe.

Beast Nest

Beast Nest


Beast Nest is the solo project of Sharmi Basu, a Mills College student who is pursuing her master’s in electronic music. Her sound will creep up on you, gently guiding you to another dimension through a blanket of feedback. Fluttering R2D2-like beeps, whizzes, zaps and dial tones will simultaneously emerge, crossed by ethereal notes tracing scratchy hums. According to Lob, “Basu has delivered some of the most psychedelic ambient performances that NoiseFest has had in the past.” Beast Nest performs Thursday, October 3, 2013 at 10 p.m. at Naked Lounge.

Name Game

Music festivals are hard. When you have a lineup of 40 to choose from, how are you possibly supposed to narrow down your options? For those who just can’t make up their minds, try this: just check out the bands with the, uh, most unusual names. Never mind that several of these names suggest pain.
1. Amphibious Gestures
2. Stress Orphan
3. Randy McKean’s Wild Horsey Ride
4. Dental Work
5. Pulsating Cyst
6. Endometrium Cuntplow

Uberkunst

Uberkunst

Instagon

Instagon

17 Years and Counting

As mentioned before, there are only two acts that have performed NorCal NoiseFest every year since inception: Instagon and Uberkunst, both local. Uberkunst is Burg’s project, and “always a spectacle sacrifice to NIAD (noise instrument analog device),” Lob says. Uberkunst’s crew typically consists of 10-plus bodies. Previous performances have included power tools, masks, screaming, destruction, torture machines and spiky outfits with a Road Warrior aesthetic. Instagon, on the other hand, performs with a different ensemble for every single show, with Lob leading the way. When it comes to NoiseFest, Lob typically assembles a handful of performers who each feed their sounds into a mixer set while he selects which sounds to amplify and overlap. One year that meant nine people making noise with jewel cases and contact mics. Odd, provocative, conceptual noise guaranteed. Uberkunst performs at Sol Collective at 10:30 p.m. Saturday, October 5, 2013 and Instagon plays at Bows and Arrows at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, October 6, 2013.

Who Will Burn the Most Miles To Get Here

1. Thirteen Hurts from Pleasant View, Colo.
2. Dental Work from Traverse City, Mich.
3. Stress Orphan from Washington, D.C.
4. Blipvert from New York, N.Y.
5. W00DY from Boston, Mass.

Crank Ensemble

Crank Ensemble

Sights to Behold

Coat hanger hooks, rubber bands, wires, chop sticks, popsicle sticks, broom straws… What more do you need? Not much, if you are making handmade cranks to play in the Crank Ensemble. These instruments are literally works of art that are then used to create noise music. Mastermind Larnie Fox orchestrates the rigid clicks and pops simultaneously into a steady progression—think clock music. You will want to see these guys up close on Sunday, October 6, 2013 at Bows and Arrows, starting at 2:30 p.m. Meanwhile, Michael Amason is known for his ongoing “Noise Tattoo” project, where he tattoos himself through an amp stack. According to Lob, “You will hear every needle mark!” Catch him at 3 p.m. on Saturday, October 5, 2013 at Sol Collective.

Acts You Will NOT Want to Stand As Close As Possible To

1. Uberkunst
2. Overdose the Katatonic
3. +DOG+
4. Striations
5. Pulsating Cyst

Acts You Will Want to Stand As Close As Possible To

1. Endometrium Cuntplow
2. Michael Amason
3. Dental Work
4. Eurostache
5. Jeff Boynton
6. Nux Vomica

+DOG+

+DOG+

Bring Earplugs

If you plan to watch Los Angeles act +DOG+, the last performance at Luna’s Café on Friday starting at 11:30 p.m., keep these things in mind. Static noise. You may feel like your head is under a nail gun, beneath the blade of a chopper or pressed against the blare of a dial-up connection. Your eye might start to twitch. Or maybe that’s just the caffeine. Likewise, if you check out /The Nothing at 5 p.m. at Sol Collective on Saturday, know what you’re getting into. You will feel like you stepped into an insane asylum, or someone’s nightmare. It will sound tortuous. You might think it’s a perfect way to scare away every child for Halloween this year. Thought I can’t confirm it, Lob also suggests earplugs for Blue Sabbath Black Cheer (11 p.m. Saturday at Sol Collective) Thirteen Hurts (7:30 p.m. Saturday at Sol Collective), and M22 (9:30 p.m. on Friday at Luna’s Café). I’d take his word for it.

6 Bands Not To Miss And Why (Lob’s Picks)

Faults

Faults

1. Faults: A local Sacramento noise/jazz trio featuring L.H.Shimanek, Kevin Corcoran and Chad Stockdale reunited, they have not played live in more than five years. They may not play out again. Do not miss it.

Overdose The Katatonic

Overdose The Katatonic

2. Overdose The Katatonic: In Lob’s words, “There is only one Jim Trash, and we have him for the weekend. Sonic brutality unleashed in a coffee house; sometimes he throws out toys!”

Amphibious Gestures

Amphibious Gestures

3. Amphibious Gestures: Lob says it best: “Space aliens from the sea with super sonic audio waves to invade your ears and mind. You think I’m kidding, but…”

Pedestrian Deposit

Pedestrian Deposit

4. Pedestrian Deposit: These guys have been on a U.S. tour recently and “SLAYING crowds everywhere,” according to Lob. Need proof? Check out the social media trails.

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer

5. Blue Sabbath Black Cheer: Lob calls them a “tribal rush of power and madness” consisting of percussion and electronics. They don’t get out here much, but when they do, they are said to leave a massive impression.

Randy McKean’s Wild Horsey Ride

Randy McKean’s Wild Horsey Ride

6. Randy McKean’s Wild Horsey Ride: This is a duo featuring saxophonist Randy McKean and electronics artist Wes Steed. McKean produces sound and Steed captures it via live analog processing, and they play together with the sounds generated. Supposedly it is nothing short of amazing.

Norcal Noisefest takes place Oct. 3 through Oct. 6, 2013. For a complete list of events, go to Norcalnoisefest.com.

A State of Being

YACHT KEEPS THINGS REFRESHINGLY WEIRD WHILE OTHERS PLAY IT SAFE

Where are the PJ Harveys, the Laurie Andersons and the Yoko Onos of Generation Y?

For every CocoRosie out there, there are infinitely more bands that keep their music exceedingly tame. In an age where it seems experimental and outspoken musicians are in decline, the Los Angeles-based conceptual electro-pop group YACHT continues to thrive in the realm of oddity and nonconformity. Sometimes they wear white leotards, sometimes they make music videos with anthropomorphized Smiangles (the band’s triangular “totem”) cavorting about extraterrestrials and sometimes they sing lyrics like, “The Earth the Earth the Earth is on fire, we don’t have no daughter, let the motherfucker burn.” They continue to make some people uncomfortable.

As far as leading members Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans are concerned, that is just fine. They realize that their music is not for everyone. They will also tell you that YACHT is more than a band. YACHT, aka Young Americans Challenging High Technology, is also a belief system and business that the two hold dear. Simply put, it is an extension of Bechtolt and Evans in every sense. In a state of perpetual collaboration on anything from writing books to DJing, blogging, making music, videos and perfume, YACHT is the banner under which the couple releases any creative output.

“We’re always working on a million things at once, we always have our hands in different pots, if you will,” Bechtolt says.

As far as YACHT the band goes, additional members include Bobby Birdman and Jeffrey Jerusalem. YACHT is playing Sacramento’s THIS Midtown in August, which, in case you haven’t heard, is 100 percent free. This is the band’s first official show in Sacramento in at least four years (they did make an appearance for a children’s show at the Memorial Auditorium with Yo Gabba Gabba in 2011).

YACHT has released five full-length albums and two EPs to date, the last four of which were released by DFA records (other DFA artists include LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip and The Rapture). Shangri-La, their last full-length (released in 2011), was well-received. Clothing manufacturers Freeze CMI liked their single “Shangri-La” so much they ripped the song’s lyrics and smacked them on a T-shirt for corporate entities like Kohl’s and Macy’s to sell, until the band intervened.

With the exception of “Shangri-La,” a sweet pop tribute to Los Angeles, the band’s lyrics are not usually something you would expect to find on a Kohl’s T-shirt. If their futuristic music videos, sound and lyrics don’t make it obvious, Bechtolt and Evans have a penchant for science and mysticism.

Evans has been a science journalist for the last 10 years, writing for publications such as National Geographic and Motherboard. Most recently she connected with Grantland, where she now maintains a science fiction column.

Meanwhile, Bechtolt formed YACHT initially as a solo venture in 2002, with the intent to incorporate technology into his performances and music. A musician and performer since his teens, he is known as a former member of the bands The Badger King and The Blow.

Both Evans and Bechtolt grew up in Portland, but also consider L.A. and Marfa, Texas their homes. The two credit Marfa, famous for its “ghost lights,” with changing their outlook on the world, and serving as a crucial source of their musical inspiration—hence the name of their 2009 album See Mystery Lights.

When I spoke to the Bechtolt and Evans over the phone, they were at their home on the border of Silver Lake and Echo Park (one of L.A.’s most picturesque locations). The playful frontman and frontwoman were still giddy about the link they had posted online hours before for their new mixtape featuring Eric Andre—as in Eric Andre from the Eric Andre Show on Adult Swim.

Dr. MDMA, M.D. is a brilliantly titled compilation of 13 songs peppered with random drops of Andre making proclamations like, “Get your medical marijuana card,” or “Legalize steroids.” The mix was made in a week. Andre, whom they just met days before, sent Bechtolt sound files he recorded on his phone, and Bechtolt cut them up and inserted them in. It’s one helluva danceable mix, including Mutsumi Kanamori’s single “Look Down At Your Feet Below” and Bill Wyman’s “Si, Si Je Suis un Rock Star.”

It was Evans’ and Bechtolt’s first time collaborating with a comedian, and now there is no turning back. In addition to writing their next album (expected to release early next year), YACHT plans to collaborate with more comedians, and is developing a TV comedy show with Amazon about the life of an opening band.

“So we’re in bed with comedy,” Evans says.

Stay tuned.

Photo by Debi Del Grande

Photo by Debi Del Grande

Do you think you will [collaborate with a comedian] again?
Jona Bechtolt: For sure.
Claire Evans: There’s a growing connection between comedy and music subculture. I think comedians and musicians have a lot in common in terms of the lifestyle that they have. They experience the same kinds of tragedies, and when a comic’s show goes horribly it’s the same as when no one comes to see your band, you know?

So does [the next album] require any trips to Marfa?
JB: We’re actually going somewhere weirder than Marfa. We’re going to the gulf shores of Alabama to film this video. And that’s all we’ll say about it for now because it has to be a surprise and a secret.

Claire, I read your piece on Grantland (“Staying Ride-or-Die for Sci-Fi in a Game of Thrones World”); I was curious how that came about, I know the Game of Thrones season ended, but were there other reasons for writing that now?
CE: I wanted to write a science fiction column because that’s something I care about deeply, and kind of wanted to come out guns blazing. I’ve gotten so much criticism for that article but also so much respect, because the fantasy versus science fiction battle is ancient, and violent and real, and I just wanted to position myself as someone who cares deeply about science fiction to the exclusion of other things, and probably to the exclusion of my own educational benefit. I am myopically interested in it.

Jona, do you guys share your feelings on a lot of these subjects?
JB: Usually, yes, we do. If you’re asking if I hate fantasy, the answer is yes, I do.

How do you like [DJing]? I’m curious about the DJing experience versus playing the live shows.
JB: At first [DJing] was really terrifying, I hated DJing at first… With playing shows I don’t feel like I have to make anyone happy… At first I thought we really had to please people [as DJs]. I get stressed out pretty easily.
CE: But when you’re DJing you’re just there and it’s just you and the music that you like.
JB: And it’s really fun to introduce people to lots of tracks they’ve never heard before and play songs that we are really in love with, and see other people fall in love with them and watch them have a physical reaction immediately. That’s really cool. And just getting the chance to spend time with people in a different way is fun, too. Playing shows is an elaborate affair for us.

I really like how you guys have your music but then you have your approach with science and mysticism and all that. Could you describe the overlap a little bit?
CE: Jona and I both grew up in sort of similar DIY and punk rock communities in the Northwest, and so part of our DNA has always been that what you believe and what you do are inseparable entities, that you manifest your beliefs by the way you live your life and the kind of art you make, and the way you share that art with other people. In the DIY community that’s always the way it is. We’re kind of kooks, and we have a range of metaphysical and philosophical views about life, and we can’t separate that from the output because that’s what we’re thinking about, that’s what we’re talking about, and so what we make is always going to have elements of that in it. It’s not necessarily that we’re trying to be dogmatic or we’re trying to lay our philosophy on the line and tell people they have to believe what we believe in order to enjoy our music, it’s just difficult to create a distinction, especially since were creative collaborators that live under the same roof. YACHT is our life. It’s all that we do. It’s all we think about.
JB: It’s not a unique thing that bands and artists have feelings and thoughts and positions on everything. A lot of the time it’s not specifically an outward thing, people aren’t jumping at the chance to say what they believe. And I think that comes from a fear of alienating fans, so we’re fearless in that regard [laughs].
CE: This is something we talk about a lot, is the idea that, I feel like a lot of people in our generation and younger who are making art and sharing it on the Internet, [have] a fear of identifying too strongly with any kind of belief or position. I feel like a lot of people are hiding behind delay and atmosphere and style, and making really cool music but not being sort of balls-out weirdos. The people that we admire the most, like the PJ Harveys and the Laurie Andersons and the Yoko Onos, those are people that cannot separate themselves from their work, and who have crazy ideas and put those ideas in the forefront. There’s a lot of hiding, and I don’t want to hide. I’d rather be criticized for having weird point of views rather than not sharing that point of view with anybody.

See YACHT live in Sacramento at THIS Midtown for FREE on August 10, 2013. THIS Midtown takes place from 4 to 9 p.m. on 20th Street between J and K streets. Would you like to know more? Go to the aptly titled Thismidtown.com.