Goodby Fly Moon Royalty

Fly Moon Royalty has been one of my favorite bands since I first saw them at Bumbershoot in 2011. In a year when I saw 370+ performances, they stood out. Here's a brief bit from the Bumbershoot 2011 performance, the first time I ever saw them:


I loved the sound the first time I heard it. Adro Boo has a great voice and is amazing live, and her writing is intense and awesome. Action Jackson on the keys and sequencers provides a better band setting for Adra's songs than most full live outfits do. Jackson's riffs and sounds worked very well for me, and the combination of Adra & Action Jackson was one of the best things in Seattle. The dancers are nice too, but they are awesome live with or without dancers. At the better shows the audience dances enough to make up for any lack of dancers on the stage.

I kept an eye out for Fly Moon Royalty and was able to catch a couple of free shows in 2012, one at the Mural Amphitheater and one at Goddess Fest held at an obscure area in Woodland Park (the park, not the zoo).

They were well worth keeping track of, putting out a couple of great albums and adding great songs to their live sets. They did an Out-to-Lunch show this Summer that was fun. Honestly, they're one of my top 3 local acts and I was hoping they'd break out nationally, they were talented enough to deserve it.

Unfortunately, in the late Fall of 2016 they announced their final show coming up on December 23. Dang, too many of my favorite local acts only get so far, look like they are poised to blow up, but then it never happens and they wind it down. Don't Talk to the Cops was similar - I loved them, every time I saw them it was an off the charts sweaty dance-fest, pretty much like Fly Moon Royalty as far as that goes. They split up this year too.

Sadly enough I didn't even make it to their final show. Sigh. Well, both Adra Boo and Action Jackson are way too talented to stop after one band, so I look forward to seeing what they get up to next, and I hope it's much more the success they deserve, they are amazingly talented and I'd love to see them get rewarded for their brilliance.

BigBldgBash 2016

The kids and a cousin and I all went to Big Building Bash or Big Bldg Bash 2015 and enjoyed it immensely, enough so that I made a point of getting tickets for 2016. This year I went with my daughter and my other daughter's boyfriend on June 4 and we had a great time.

The bash is held in an odd sorta DIY/industrial building down by where the Spokane St. Viaduct crosses Highway 99. It's surrounded by the 270 degree turn from Eastbound on Alaskan Way to Northbound on Highway 99, a big huge flying concrete monstrosity that circles the block up above. The main parking area is across the street directly under the Spokane St. Viaduct. The surrounding neighborhood and the space itself are quite unique.

You enter the Big Building's lot from the West end, on the North side from the surface street just south of the Spokane St. Viaduct, into the lot next to the Big Building. A couple or three food trucks line the area and there are tables and benches. One of the venues is just inside the building here and usually has the garage door rolled open so you can hear things mildly well.

You can see the "front" side of the Big Building in this photo, it's the blue-greenish building in the middle right, below the Highway 99 Viaduct.
You go in the door and the first space is to the right, the one with the garage door opening to where you just were. They set up 2 stages, one at each end, so the bands can overlap setup and tear down a little more, making for tighter turn-arounds and more bands overall. Further down the hall stairs led up to another performance space, this one is on the North side of the building. The rooms up here look like artists spaces and small dance practice spaces. If you skip the stairs and continue past on the first level you get to the loading bay which is the largest stage, or rather the 2 largest stages. In 2016 they put a big bar area in between the two stages in the loading bay, and also opened up another outdoor space at the East end of the building. They also had another path from the big loading bay to some vendor/artist tables, a bar, and a DJ.

It took some wandering about to figure out where all of the spaces were, it was a bit of a maze of hallways and back areas. This description doesn't do the space justice, it really is a Big Building and this year they had blacklight art installed in the main hall past the stairs up towards the bathrooms that gave the section a surreal dark-and-light-at-the-same-time feel. Suspended geometric structures made of orange and green UV driven pigments that glowed brightly provided most of the light. The occasional white cotton shirt or teeth glowing brightly in the crowd below as they shuffled through the hallway, edging past each other, provided the remaining light. The hallway had a somewhat ethereal feel to it. You could see well enough to get around, but it was dark enough for details to fade in the corners, making everything feel a little vague.

It was a gorgeous hot day and there was a dense selection of great bands playing a wide variety of music. Most of the time 2 or 3 bands were playing at the same time and a wide range of music was available. Soft folky stuff with harmonies, cranky bluesy stuff, thrashy punkish sweaty sets and angry metal head bangers, pop, synths, singer songwriters and the hard to describe in between bits, you could find good music and bands you'd never heard of before kicking ass all over the place. A bit more slide guitar than usual maybe, but that seems like the new norm since we saw the same at Fisherman's Village in Everett.

So many good bands, but I didn't take much in the way of pictures or videos though. I'll go ahead and use whatever I can find off the internet (OK, off of flickr anyway) to illustrate my blog.

High points in no particular order:

• Black Plastic Clouds played the fest again this year. They were one of my favorite discoveries last year so it was good to see them again, still rocking out and working the crowd into a sweat.
• Cloud Person (another repeat) put on a great set, and they had a child of a band member join them on-stage, it was just about the cutest most endearing thing I've ever seen.
  
• Crazy Eyes loud and swaggering on the back stage, smashing away at the electric piano and rocking out with a good grinding pounding electric sound.
  
• Wild Powwers playing fast, tight rock and roll - great vocals, standout drumming, driving bass and a great almost classic guitar-oriented-rock sound
  
• Pillar Point's spacey synths and good driving beats and haunting sound, one of the better fits with the venue.
• & Yet playing a tight set, different sound with the strings, extremely well written songs. Like Pillar Point and Black PLastic Clouds for that matter, Pillar Point also played back to back in festivals, playing both 2015 and 2016. I actually got a video of them last year.
• The later shows outside when it got dark, especially the ones with the lasers and fog, were outstanding.
• The back stage, the furthest from the front that was also outdoors, had odd flame towers - 20+ foot tool metal towers that vent flaming propane clouds above us under computer control. They setup a demo where you played a kind of "Simon" like game where you had to repeat a sequence of taps in 1 of 4 colored quadrants on a translucent drum head looking device, each success leading to a repeat of the sequence with another random quadrant selected making it harder and harder to repeat without errors. Eventually the player would botch it, missing a note or playing the wrong one, and the flame towers would erupt with five clouds of furiously burning propane above our heads, rising up towards the level of the nearby Alaskan Way Viaduct, baking us with additional heat fort a few seconds. Basically 5 fireballs would erupt and we'd all break out in sweat, then they'd dissipate in a few seconds and the game would begin again.

I'm convinced that the obscure local festivals - Big Bldg Bash, Macefield Fest, Fisherman's Village - provide by far the best value in music. Huge lineups of great local bands in local venues, not like the corporate polished mega-shows at all, very much unique personal efforts that reflect their neighborhoods and the Seattle music scene with opportunities to see more local bands than you even knew existed. I see plenty of shows and these are the ones that stick in my memory and define the year in music for me when I look back after the fact. West Seattle Fest and Timber Fest also fit this mold, Van's Fest is also the sort of thing I'm talking about and I'm sure I'm leaving many equivalents out. I recommend finding the more obscure smaller scale non-corporate festivals and support them with your ticket money and enthusiasm, you won't be disappointed.

KEXP: Seattle's Living Room

I needed to settle in with WiFi for a bit to catch up on work so I drove over to the KEXP studio public space.

Plenty of reasonably comfortable couches and chairs, KEXP playing over the nice sound system, espresso counter, this is Seattle's living room.

I got my usual coffee drink, settled in and took care of the electronic work. The WiFi worked fine, so I was able to get done in time to join the group let into the hall outside the studio to watch an interesting performance.

Gerald Collier, Friselle and John Doe each performed some Woody Guthrie material and spoke about Guthrie's influence.
The performance was mic'ed and produced extremely well, the sound we got through the speakers in the hallway was exceptional. A crew of 3 or 4 cameras operators stood and squatted in the middle of the circle of musicians, filming and taking pohotos. We had been warned not to try to take any photos or they'd remove us, so the photos available from KEXP are all I've got. They took enough footage and I'm sure they recorded the whole thing on multitrack equipment so with any luck they'll provide the performance video at some point. KEXP's videos have wonderful sound and clean clear video.
Not that this video has much to do with the performance we saw, but it's a nice example of KEXP's video ouput. Perhaps 30 of us, from geezers like me to 4 year olds being held by their dad all stood rapt and listened. Then the performance ended and we went back into the public area, Seattle's living room. I pulled the laptop out to get back to work in a better frame of mind than usual, I have to say I enjoy getting to hang out at the KEXP space.

Fisherman's Village 2016

Carina and I made it to all 3 days of Fisherman's Village Music Festival in Everett. I'd missed it previously and regretted it, they had a great lineup of local talent. We made up for it this year, seeing all kinds of new (to me) bands, different styles, great venues, we had a blast.
I didn't track band names, no notes or anything. That's be too much like work! That means I have tow work out who the bands are by looking at the schedule and relying on my weak memory. I think this is Bear Mountain based on their late Saturday slot in the historic Everett Theater. Probably.

Bands I know more about or have seen before are easier to track. I recognize Julia Massey and the 5 Finger Discount, we saw her/them at the Anchor pub. Great set!

Julia Massey had been highly recommended to me and I'd never quite managed to catch a set so it was satisfying to finally catch them. They're great just like my distant cousin told me. Fun local act having a good time performing for an appreciative audience, Fisherman's Village delivered and then some.

Star Anna played an intense, intimate set at the Anchor. I've seen her at Bumbershoot and looked forward to this set, I'm glad we made it. The Anchor is actually several blocks from the rest of the festival, and by this time (Sunday) our feet were getting sore. We drove the car down to the waterfront and back a few times to save our energy and I'm glad we did. We eventually wore out, but not before seeing Star Anna putting on a show and I suspect we might not have made it without the car to save our energy.



We also got some nice sushi next door at J Ramen and Sushi. That and the tea warmed us up and got us motivated to stay for more music. 



It was a cold and occasionally wet festival, which is unfortunate when there's an outdoor stage. It's still fun when the band is good, like Fauna Shade, for example.

But even for local heroes like Fauna Shade, fewer people show up when it's raining and crowd energy tends to be a little more muted. Harder to be hot when you're cold? Great set and the crowd enjoyed it, but if it had been 20 degrees warmer we'd have all been dancing and moshing and there would have been twice as many people. Outdoor Festivals in the greater Puget Sound area face this risk, at least we had some cooperative evening weather, anyway.

We did get a little bit of action at Zippy's early Saturday, catching Tobias the Owl, a personal favorite, Robert Blake, and Johanna Warren

The indoor stages were great. The historic Everett Theater is an awesome venue.

Plenty of room up front for the crowd to get in close and dance. The Ramblin' Years definitely had us packing the aisles and the front area, dancing and having a great time.
Grace Love and the True Loves played a spectacular set at the Everett Theater late Friday night.


They brought down the house, powerful music and powerful vocal performance, tight band with chops, the guitar and horn section are standout and the bass, drums and keys fill in the sound and rive the beat and the whole thing just has us dancing and jumping and yelling, definitely a peak experience.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention all of the great bands we saw at Tony V's Garage.
Many of our favorite new discoveries were here all weekend. Skyemonkey, Sundries, Hollers, Cracker Factory, Campion, Sphyramid and Leava all played great sets.

Notice the dude playing a slide in this picture. There were more slide players at this festival than any other event I've ever seen.
I've been writing this post by wandering through my pictures to trigger my memory. This has the interesting effect of generating content in backwards order. Sunday bands are first up in my photo stream, then Saturday, and now I'm finishing up with Friday, the first day of the festival. Slightly odd how the minor tech details can dictate how you create something.

EMP Pop Conference Get UR Freak On

This is a longer version of a blog I already published; I spent some time talking and thinking about the theme - transgression and weirdness - in this one, ended up editing it out at the time but I wanted to publish the longer and more opinionated version, so here it is.

I've mentioned that I like to take engineers visiting from out of town out to see some local music. Recently the EMP held the annual Pop Conference with the theme "Get UR Freak On: Music, Weirdness and Transgression" and booked TacocaT, Chastity Belt, S and Childbirth for an opening show in the Sky Church.

This is the sort of different musical experience available in Seattle that would be hard to come by in most cities. The top few cities have comparable and better - NY, Chicago, LA, and a few other huge cities have truly varied and huge music scenes, but few cities under 1 million have the variety and depth and deep bench that Seattle has. This is exactly the sort of show I look for to take the visiting engineers - it's even all ages!

There are challenges, though. The Get UR Freak On theme and sexual content and tone are generally not appropriate in a business environment. On the show web page there were links for the bands & one of the links led directly to "I Only Fucked You as a Joke"

From the album it's a girl!

While this is a valid artistic expression and probably more common than anyone wants to admit (and a great song!), this is inappropriate in a business context.

On the other hand, we're talking a business context in Seattle, after all. And I've had mild problems with boundaries on occasion too, I overshare on occasion and... well, I talked myself into it.

I mitigated the risk of triggering corporate pain and HR investigations (can you tell I work at a large corporation?) by adding a "BTW If you follow the links and listen to the bands, use headphones. Some of this stuff is NSFW - REALLY!" clause to the email and sent it out to 10 coworkers at Cisco. I wouldn't try that with a larger list or a list that included more people that I didn't know well, but I felt safe in forwarding it to my coworkers, we're all adults with reasonable senses of humor.

It was a great call, of course, but that was never in doubt as far as bands go. About the only thing that didn't go well is that we took so long eating dinner before the show that we missed Childbirth - dang, they had songs I wanted to hear live. Better luck next time, I'll have to keep an eye out for them.

We managed to make it for a classic S set: introspective and haunting, guitar driven without wailing, more a reverb and space approach. Sometimes the lyrics were more out front with multiple parts, sometimes the lyrics faded into the songs yet echoed with emotions felt from a distance or remembered with fading intensity. The instruments change up on occasion for some keyboards but the haunting quality and the feeling of remembered emotional intensity remains.

The EMP Sky Church is a great place to see a show, nobody is very far from the performers and the sound is excellent. My cell phone shot above doesn't do it justice, but it gives you some idea of where we are and the scale of the performance space, anyway. I found a nice creative commons photo from Joe Mabel (here's his flickr page)

I enjoyed it but the Indian engineers were subdued - it's kinda subdued music as far as that goes, I suppose. They were looking for more active music, stronger beats and motion and dancing preferred. Dancy pop music would be more up their alley.

Chastity Belt was up next and while they're not poppy, they certainly brought a higher energy level, louder beat and more positive subject matter to the table. Chastity Belt is more guitar oriented rock and roll, loud with backbeat and a full sound - rhythm and lead guitar, bass, drums and solid rock and roll vocals. Not pretty and polished, more powerful and sneering or laughing - sometimes with us, sometimes at us, a committed performance with a fuck you if you don't like it attitude. That very attitude makes it more appealing and evocative. I just convinced myself they're punk rock too (coming from me that's a complement) but I've never sweated the categories all that much..

They use irony and hit subjects that aren't often covered, or cover them from an angle different from what you're used to. Rock and roll was originally about transgression and so was punk and so is Chastity Belt if you look at it that way. Chastity Belt holds up the great "outsider music" tradition of providing a voice for an attitude, a point of view, and excluded people that is usually drowned out and preached against and trivialized or worse still demonized.

Since my cell phone photo is lame as usual I dug up another creative commons photo so you can see what we saw. Heck, with my nearsightedness we're probably seeing more than I saw at the show in this photo, it's got details! (This photo is from Joe Mabel again; his flickr)

The vocals in Chastity Belt are classic rock and roll, not pretty but expressive, able to get raw, to surge to a powerful crescendo and wind it back, but used in a pretty aggressive manner. This is not subtle music, this is loud amplified music that knows it's load and amplified and likes it and has a swagger or maybe a strut.

Fun set, talented band worth seeing in a great venue.

Next up was the sheer (surf?) pop sweetness of TacocaT. This was the perfect for the visiting engineers. Well executed songs, guitar driven with a great beat, very dance friendly. Bright and exuberant, TacocaT has so much fun you can't help but have fun too.

I have no idea if the visiting engineers were able to hear the vocals and understand them, they all speak and understand English very well but getting TacocaT's word play and underlying meaning can be challenging. Figuring out cultural references the first time you hear a song in a live setting in a non-native tongue would be challenging.

That's OK, they loved the show based on the music and the beat and the performer's visual appeal and what they got of the word play, it was a wonderful upbeat fun set. TacocaT always puts on a great live show - you should see them outdoors on a sunny day with a bubble machine!

Knowing what the songs are about, they are another example of songs that are "outside" of the usual POV for rock and roll. Most rock and roll has a leering attitude towards women; when Ted Nugent's song sang "Hey Baby" it was followed by "Get into the back of my car." Direct and brutal and not even remarkable back then. When TacocaT sings "Hey Girl" their purpose is exactly 180 degrees in the opposite direction: to push back on street harassment, not glorify and justify it.

The booking for this show delivered. Get UR Freak On indeed. All of the bands are out of the rock and roll mainstream in a way that seems like it shouldn't be a mainstream criteria at all: they're groups with reversed sex ratios. Some are all women, some have a token dude. This is the exact opposite of the commercial reality in the business of music. Check out Coachella and Sasquatch where the norm  is all dude bands (5 out of 6) and the cutting edge bands have one woman. All-woman-bands are unusual at festivals and that's not because there aren't a ridiculous number of talented all-women-bands out there. Anybody not mired in their privilege knows that there's structural, cultural, financial, and who knows how many other roadblocks and barriers placed in the way of creative outsiders.

Music can be a serious business that moves the cultural consensus and penetrates our careful structures of falsehoods and prejudices and silences and taboos that allow us to ignore our privileges. Ignorance of privilege and it's relative plausible deniability are important elements in helping us continue to behave as ignorant privileged assholes. I swim in privilege and I have a hard time seeing it - our culture is just that good at hiding it and normalizing it and justifying it and misdirection, and it's hard to motivate myself to give up on the illusion that I'm better than most and earned the good stuff that privilege brings.

When someone steps outside of the fake cultural construct it forces us to see our privilege or at least makes it harder to miss. Not to get all meta and cosmic about it, but music can provide access to the marginalized and disrespected, allowing them to pull back the curtain a bit.

Men have been writing and performing explicitly raunchy songs about sex with violent overtones and outright rape for decades. A few women do songs about taboo subjects like menstruation and being sex positive and they're the ones who are transgressive? This brings the ludicrous nature of things, how out of balance it is, into a clearer focus, and at the same time it increases the cultural space available for previously taboo topics. Rock and roll and the outsider music genres like it (blues, hip hop, rap, genres originally considered transgressive that have been mainstreamed) allow us to see some of the problems and illusions and fallacies of our situation if we're paying attention.

Thanks to three kick ass bands for providing a great show and a different perspective and challenging me to try to get out of my comfort zone, It ain't easy and it's never particularly done, but I'm better for the attempts.

Shane Diamanti Headlines the Vera Project Friday October 16

I'd only done two interviews on my blog, but Shane Diamanti saw the Knowmads interview and hit me up. Shane was a teenager in High School in Lynnwood and had a bit of viral success in early 2013 with his Dictionary Freestyle Rap.

This is a Dictionary Freestyle I did during hip hop club! I hope everyone can enjoy! Our hip hop adviser just start throwing me random words out of the dictionary and I went off of that and it came out pretty dope! There are some parts where it's muted because our hip hop adviser said I couldn't upload it unless I muted the part's I swore so I did! But hope everyone will enjoy the freestyle I did over Sunshine by Atmosphere!
Posted by Shane Diamanti on Thursday, May 2, 2013

I was a bit flattered and happy to interview Shane. Shane dreamed of being a successful performer and wasn't shy about reaching out. I wondered how things would go for him, if he'd ever achieve his dream of headlining shows.

A couple years later in early 2015 Shane got in touch and let me know that it was going pretty well! He had a show at El Corazon in May, and if he wasn't headlining at least it was his EP Release Show. I went ahead and interviewed him before the show and while I missed that show I was able to catch him opening for Mark Battles at the Vera Project a month or two later.

Talking to Shane before he managed to make some of his dreams come true and seeing how he worked towards them, in some ways the worst things that happened to him were the best things. They got him out of his comfort zone, motivated him like nobody's business, and inspired his music. It wasn't clear to me how he might achieve his dreams, and I doubt it was clear to him when he was still in High School, but in adversity he found his commitment to his craft and pursued that like a maniac and the rest is just the details.

So the latest news is that Shane is headlining a show this Friday at the Vera Project.


I'll be there. I'm signed up as the show photographer, but that's probably wishful thinking. If any of the key slots needs to be filled I'll end up doing that instead, so I may end up at the front door or in concessions or roaming security, we'll see. In any event I'll end up helping out with cleanup and I'll sneak into the show room and catch some of the show at least. If you make it to the show, say hi!

Musical Plans

There are interesting musical options over the next few days. After some thought I'm planning an ambitious weekend, hopefully it'll work.

It starts with Friday's Out To Lunch show by the Maldives, one of my favorite local acts (I've got lots of favorites). I saw them at the first Run Vera Run event at Seward Park, at an Out To Lunch show on Harbor Steps a few years back with my daughter, and at Bumbershoot more than once. Jason Dodson also does an occasional solo bit too. Here's a photo by Joe Mabel of the Maldives at the Ballard Seafood Fest, as you can see they have a fairly large band. Fun band, well rehearsed, alt-country songs, good stuff.

The weather looks to be hot and sunny, so maybe we'll stop for a beer on the way back to the office since I'm working the regular 9 to 5 gig in the office downtown.

After work I head over to the Vera Project where I'm volunteering - running sound, so I'll plug microphones in for the Youth Speaks event. This will be poetry and spoken word with a DJ so it's probably some music to, but pre-recorded so the microphone setup isn't too complex. No band to mic, just a few mics for spoken word performers.

I'll miss the Friday night West Seattle Summerfest with Pony Time, The Shivas, La Luz, Lance Romance doing a DJ set and the Thermals headlining - solid lineup and a free show so I hate to miss it, but I still have Saturday.

The West Seattle Summerfest lineup on Saturday includes Sisters, Naked Giants, Wimps, Black Whales, S, The Fame Riot, Kithkin, Vox Mod and the Cave Singers and more. It lasts from Noon to late but I don't, so I figure my son Ben and I can go and see 2 or 3 bands. Maybe Naked Giants, Wimps and Black Whales in the late afternoon, for example. Here's a picture of Naked Giants (at least I think it's Naked Giants, it's from the EMP Sound Off! this Spring)

From here the logistics are slightly tricky. My son is 17 which is fine for West Seattle Summerfest, but the Minus 5 are playing the Tractor Tavern (21+) so my son can't go. I'll have to get him home but leave myself in Ballard. If I drive all the way home from West Seattle to drop Ben off I'm probably not going to be energetic and motivated enough to get our of the house and drive back to Seattle in the evening.

Looks like I need to have Ben head home with a sister, or put him on the bus. That way I can see the Minus 5 with McCaughey and whoever - I saw them at Bumbershoot several years back and really don't want to miss the chance to see them again. They already canceled a Tractor show to go play a show with Tweedy (it may have been a Young Fresh Fellows show that was cancelled, my memory is uncertain).

I can't find pictures from Young Fresh Fellows or Minus 5 shows I've been to, so I'll post an odd (crappy) video of Scott McCaughey doing a Minus 5 song called "Oh Sht Man." Great song, lousy video but the audio is OK. This was from a many hours long "show" with Robyn Hitchcock and other local Seattle luminaries at the Cyclops in Belltown. I think it was really more of a rehearsal than a show - they didn't charge anything and just played an insane number of songs. Hitchcock said they were auditioning the place as a hangout to work on their performance to replace an older hangout they used to use in Belltown.


West Seattle Summerfest is a personal favorite - I remember seeing Shelby Earl doing her different songs with a simple stripped down approach, her music that had something - and this was in 2010, before the albums and NPR love and Amazon's "Best Album You Might Have Missed" award. You can see some amazing, memorable bands and it's free


There's a nice circularity here - I led off with the Out To Lunch series, wandered over to Shelby Earl via West Seattle Summerfest, and now of course I can't stop until I also point out that Shelby Earl is playing a free Out To Lunch show on Wednesday August 19 at Two Union Square. It's worth checking out the web site, there are so many good bands playing like Fly Moon Royalty, Naomi Wachira, the Staxx Brothers, Craft Spells, McTuff, The Dusty 45s, Lee Oskar, Tubaluba, Bleach Bear, Vaudeville Etiquette, St. Paul De Vence, Industrial Revelation, Clinton Fearon and the Boogie Brown Band, Eldridge Gravy and the Court Supreme and more.

Here's the overall West Seattle Summerfest schedule, this is a great lineup of local talent for free. I may miss most of it but I encourage anybody who has the time to see as many bands as possible.

Band	Day	2015 Set time
Gibraltar	FRIDAY	3:00
Evening Bell	FRIDAY	4:00
Pony Time	FRIDAY	5:00
Deep Creep	FRIDAY	6:00
The Shivas	FRIDAY	7:00
La Luz	FRIDAY	8:00
DJ Lance Romance	FRIDAY	9:00
The Thermals	FRIDAY	9:30
Sisters	SATURDAY	11:00
Pig Snout	SATURDAY	12:00
Navvi	SATURDAY	1:00
Timbre Barons	SATURDAY	2:00
Naked Giants	SATURDAY	3:00
Wimps	SATURDAY	4:00
Black Whales	SATURDAY	5:00
S	SATURDAY	6:00
The Fame Riot	SATURDAY	7:00
Kithkin	SATURDAY	8:00
Vox Mod	SATURDAY	9:00
The Cave Singers	SATURDAY	9:30
The Solvents	SUNDAY	1:00
Memphis Radio Kings	SUNDAY	2:00
Stereo Embers	SUNDAY	3:00
Sick Sad World	SUNDAY	4:00

TacocaT, Chastity Belt, S and Childbirth at the EMP Pop Conference

I've mentioned that I like to take engineers visiting from out of town out to see some local music. Recently the EMP held the annual Pop Conference with the theme "Get UR Freak On: Music, Weirdness and Transgression" and booked TacocaT, Chastity Belt, S and Childbirth for an opening show in the Sky Church.

This is the sort of different musical experience available in Seattle that would be hard to come by in most cities. The top few cities have comparable and better - NY, Chicago, LA, and a few other huge cities have truly varied and huge music scenes, but few cities under 1 million have the variety and depth and deep bench that Seattle has. This is exactly the sort of show I look for to take the visiting engineers - it's even all ages!

There are challenges, though. The Get UR Freak On theme and sexual content and tone are generally not appropriate in a business environment. On the show web page there were links for the bands & one of the links led directly to "I Only Fucked You as a Joke"

From the album it's a girl!

While this is a valid artistic expression and probably more common than anyone wants to admit (and a great song!), this is inappropriate in a business context.

On the other hand, we're talking a business context in Seattle, after all. And I've had mild problems with boundaries on occasion too, I overshare on occasion and... well, I talked myself into it.

I mitigated the risk of triggering corporate pain and HR investigations (can you tell I work at a large corporation?) by adding a "BTW If you follow the links and listen to the bands, use headphones. Some of this stuff is NSFW - REALLY!" clause to the email and sent it out to 10 coworkers at Cisco. I wouldn't try that with a larger list or a list that included more people that I didn't know well, but I felt safe in forwarding it to my coworkers, we're all adults with reasonable senses of humor.

It was a great call, of course, but that was never in doubt as far as bands go. About the only thing that didn't go well is that we took so long eating dinner before the show that we missed Childbirth - dang, they had songs I wanted to hear live. Better luck next time, I'll have to keep an eye out for them.

We managed to make it for a classic S set: introspective and haunting, guitar driven without wailing, more a reverb and space approach. Sometimes the lyrics were more out front with multiple parts, sometimes the lyrics faded into the songs yet echoed with emotions felt from a distance or remembered with fading intensity. The instruments change up on occasion for some keyboards but the haunting quality and the feeling of remembered emotional intensity remains.

The EMP Sky Church is a great place to see a show, nobody is very far from the performers and the sound is excellent. My cell phone shot above doesn't do it justice, but it gives you some idea of where we are and the scale of the performance space, anyway. I found a nice creative commons photo from Joe Mabel (here's his flickr page)

I enjoyed it but the Indian engineers were subdued - it's kinda subdued music as far as that goes, I suppose. They were looking for more active music, stronger beats and motion and dancing preferred. Dancy pop music would be more up their alley.

Chastity Belt was up next and while they're not poppy, they certainly brought a higher energy level, louder beat and more positive subject matter to the table. Chastity Belt is more guitar oriented rock and roll, loud with backbeat and a full sound - rhythm and lead guitar, bass, drums and solid rock and roll vocals. Not pretty and polished, more powerful and sneering or laughing - sometimes with us, sometimes at us, a committed performance with a fuck you if you don't like it attitude. That very attitude makes it more appealing and evocative. I just convinced myself they're punk rock too (coming from me that's a compliment) but I've never sweated the categories all that much..

Since my cell phone photo is lame as usual I dug up another creative commons photo so you can see what we saw. Heck, with my nearsightedness we're probably seeing more than I saw at the show in this photo, it's got details! (This photo is from Joe Mabel again; his flickr)

The vocals in Chastity Belt are classic rock and roll, not pretty but expressive, able to get a bit raw, to surge to a powerful crescendo and wind it back, but used in a pretty aggressive manner. This is not subtle music, this is loud amplified music that knows it's load and amplified and likes it and has a swagger or maybe a strut.

Fun set, talented band worth seeing in a great venue.

Next up was the sheer (surf?) pop sweetness of TacocaT. This was the perfect for the visiting engineers. Well executed songs, guitar driven with a great beat, very dance friendly. Bright and exuberant, TacocaT has so much fun you can't help but have fun too.

I have no idea if the visiting engineers were able to hear the vocals and understand them, they all speak and understand English very well but getting TacocaT's word play and underlying meaning can be challenging. Figuring out cultural references the first time you hear a song in a live setting in a non-native tongue would be challenging.

That's OK, they loved the show based on the music and the beat and the performer's visual appeal and what they got of the word play, it was a wonderful upbeat fun set. TacocaT always puts on a great live show - you should see them outdoors on a sunny day with a bubble machine!

Thanks to three kick ass bands for providing a great show and a different perspective and entertaining some friends who flew pretty much all the way around the world for the privilege. I love showing Seattle's music scene off, especially when the bands are so talented and fun. Another great show!

2015 EMP Sound Off! Ruled Like It Always Does

I work with engineers from India who visit Seattle for a few months and work on assorted technical issues around our Mediasense media recording server appliance. As a total local music geek, I've taken it upon myself to make sure they get a good introduction to the Seattle music scene before they head back home.

It's tricky - finding a good show that fits 4 or 5 schedules, making sure we have some way to get there and back, making sure it's not too weird or offbeat (I like that stuff but many don't), the venue's not too dive-ish, etc. All ages shows tend to be a good bet, less drinking and more focus on the music

Every Spring the all-ages EMP Sound Off! shows happen in February with the Finals in March (more or less). This is reliably one of my favorite sets of shows every year. I love getting to know new bands and I'll get to see 12 bands I've never heard of (well, this year I'd heard of 2 but that's an outlier, never happened before). The EMP chooses great bands from a variety of genres out of a large number of applicants and the talent is always amazing.

Each of the 3 semifinal shows has 4 bands, for example we saw Bleachbear, Supersoaked, Champagne Babylon and Night Space. The bands go on in a random order and play for about 40 minutes each.

Bleachbear winning their Semifinal round

Champagne Babylon got the Wild Card runner up spot

Super Soaked rocking out

The judges gather after the show and award a winner and a runner up. There's also an audience participation award; we (the audience) scream for each band and the band with the loudest fans gets some additional prizes. The winner of each of the 3 semifinals goes to the finals. One band from the 3 wild card (runner up) teams is also selected bringing the total to 4 bands.

Once again the 4 bands play in random order and the judges award the title and we all cheer and head home happy and sweaty after another great night of music.

The winner gets studio time and equipment and a performance slot at Bumbershoot. There were a couple of additional festivals with buyers in attendance signing up bands for the year's regional festivals.

This year the energy was very positive and we had a wide range of acts and styles of music. I enjoyed the heck out of it and every single band I saw is worth keeping an eye on. Bleachbear, Naked Giants, Emma Lee Toyoda and One Above None Below have all been getting gigs around town & that's just the shows I noticed.

In the finals One Above and None Below came from the Wild Card slot to win it all with an electric performance against intense competition - intensely happy and upbeat competition, every single act seemed to be having the time of their life and obviously enjoyed getting to play for us.

The peak acts got us dancing and sweating and having a great time, and every act was interesting and different and unique. It was  a memorable introduction to the all-ages Seattle music scene for the engineers who'd flown around the globe from almost the exact opposite side.

Shane Diamanti: Upcoming EP Release Show at El Corazon

Shane Diamanti has a sold out EP Release show this Friday May 22 at El Corazón.

I interviewed Shane two years ago and figured it was time to check back in.

It’s been a couple of years, what've you been up to?
Shane: I did “Dictionary Freestyle” on Facebook and that blew me up (over 1,000 likes & 100 shares, feel free to check it out and give it some love), I got tons of messages, I walked around my city and people knew who I was. That was crazy.

I went and saw Sam Lachow, he came up to was like “I’m a fan of you man” “What?” “Yeah, your dictionary free style!” what the heck, and Raz Simone came up to me “I know who you are.” I look up to these guys, it was cool.

I wrote a lot but I wasn't recording for a while.

Shane “worked” the Sam Lachow w/Gifted Gab & BFA show at the Neptune in November of 2014 from the audience
Shane: I met people that night, when Sam called for people to get on stage they yelled “pick Shane” and Sam said “I know Shane, get up here Shane” and people might’ve been rapping and having fun, but I was talking to everyone on stage so I could get the connections. I already knew Ariana DeBoo and I was talking to Sam’s saxophone player and we’re cool now, I was just talking to him today. I talked to Raz that day, Sam, to all of them.

That inspired me – damn, I could be on that stage again! The last time I did shows was in High School and only 30 people came, it wasn't that cool.

I’m going to book a show, I booked it at El Corazón lounge – when I messaged them first they were like “you want a weekday?” and I said “you want it to sell out?” and they said “all right, you can have a Friday.” 

It’s about to sell out. (It sold out weeks ago now.)

I’m excited for that, I’ve never headlined before, this is my first headline.

Who are you playing with? 

Shane: Ronnie Dylan & Dyllyn Greenwood, my DJ Jay Battle & Ronnie Dylan’s DJ is Jake Crocker

Release show? 

Shane: Yes, my EP release, my first professional recorded EP. I always recorded in my room but now I’m recording down at Jay Battle place. It’s called “Changed My Mind.” Over time I changed my mind about what style I should have, so I was like I should just have an EP with every style, trying something out.

I’m still going to do stuff off my album, I’m working on getting that out next year in December. I’m working on a mixtape that IS my style so people know what my style is like. I’ve been trying to get a whole bunch of music written. I’ve been working for this for six years.

I always dreamt this stuff – one day I’m going to be on the radio, I’m about to be on the radio. One day I’m going to sell out a show, I’m going to sell out a show! (Sure enough, he sold out the show).

I always dreamt this stuff, but now I’m about to do it so now I gotta make dreams that are even higher. Next year I want to have an album release in December and I want to sell out the Neptune. That’s my goal.

I want this show to be for the fans. They’re not really my fans, I call them friends. I took the bus to Olympia, Lacey, Everett, Arlington, Marysville, I’m going to Wenatchee taking the train this weekend, to meet everybody. It’s one thing to send someone a link “yeah, come to my show” but it’s another thing to meet them in person, hand them their ticket and see their face. They’re happy to meet me and I’m like “I’m happy to meet you!” it goes both ways.

 It’s going to be crazy!

Sebastian Mehenka covers "A Sky Full of Stars"

My wife pointed out Sebastian Mehenka's work on YouTube to me and  I enjoyed it. His video of "A Sky Full of Stars" in particular was well done. He covered it for his girlfriend and his clear earnest vocals carry the romantic song with a nice effects presence making it sound like he's singing in a large echoing room. The piano playing is nice and I'm pretty impressed by the visual content too. There are some interesting ideas and themes. BTW was that a shrimp or a lobster scooting along? Surprising yet fitting visual element, somehow.

He has other content worth checking out too.
Sebastian lives somewhere off in Canada near Toronto, nowhere near where I live, so YouTube may be the only way I'd ever see Sebastian's work. I always enjoy it when I stumble across nicely crafted music and listen to something unanticipated that I like.

Katie McNally Trio at a Bothell house show

Through work contacts I heard that katie McNally, a talented fiddler, was playing a house show in Bothell, which is right next door to the town I live in on the north end of Lake Washington. Dana and I went and had a great time. Katie McNally described herself as mostly a Scottish-style fiddler then proceeded to play all kinds of different music that I'm pretty sure included Scottish and Cape Breton and Galacian music, plus something written by a Bengali in a European style (the details elude me, I should've taken notes), her own compositions, and more.

Katie was interesting to listen to as she introduced songs and told stories, and then the playing started and I was transported. I grew up listening to bluegrass music on my dad's stereo back in the sixties. He recorded some at the monthly Saturday Maltby Bluegrass Jam - which is still running 50 years later, amazingly enough. Every weekend we'd listen to the KRAB live Bluegrass show - late at night, live on the radio for hours on end. There was always a fiddle and a guitar, usually a banjo, more often than not a singer or three, and occasional percussion. Katie's music wasn't exactly the same, rather it's one of the main roots of the folk music I grew up listening to, filtered through Appalachia and recordings from the thirties. The music has continued to grow and thrive in parallel and some of the more interesting pieces were composed by Katie - they sounded old school as heck, like I'd grown up listening to riffs stolen from them, and I'd never heard them before. That immediate familiarity and comfort stands out. I was listening to music played by someone I'd never met playing songs I'd never heard and it felt like I was coming home to the familiar haunts I'd grown up in.

It was evocative - it took me back to my childhood growing up in Edmonds - the instruments were different, Katie's trio mostly played with a violin, viola and grand piano; sometimes with 2 fiddles, but it was hauntingly familiar. The reels and amazing string duets and the interplay with the complex piano arrangements all added different elements, and the viola often switched to pezacata and struck approaches to get a variety of sounds. He also played some of the softest accompaniment I've ever heard, very subtle stuff. It paid off to listen very intently, and the room as very quiet, even the younger kids mesmerized by the performance.

The dynamics were interesting and the quiet bits would build both in volume and rhythm to peaks with the musicians wailing away, then Katie thumping out a beat on the carpet as they are all sawing and playing away to bring it back home and wind the parts back together. Underneath it all there was the frequent return to the strings winding around each other, skipping along and playing off each other, converging on notes then playing intervals against each other, multi-string violin bowing increasing the volume and intensity and complexity as the music comes alive at the touch of the fingers of the musicians.


The talent and precision was breathtaking and the songs were powerful; we all enjoyed the show. The pianist and the viola/2nd fiddle player each took the spotlight for a bit and performed a solo number - the pianist calling himself a poseur for playing a Galician tune on a piano, since pianos are not authentic Galician instruments. Poseur or not, it was inspired. He played with rhythms and nearly percussive approaches on the keys - I really don't have a good vocabulary to describe it. The solo piano number was amazing and the sideman did a classic Brahms number that was tasty and we had a break - and opened the windows, it was very warm - and the trio played a second set.

The empathy the musicians had for each other bordering on telepathy, the way they could play with tempos and alternate transitions on scales, playing with tempo without losing each other, reflecting tempos and rhythms and passages across instruments gave the live performance a very organic spontaneous feel - structured and well rehearsed yet with plenty of room to improvise and respond to each other.

The trio did a number of reels that were thrilling - moving briskly and precisely, pretty soon zipping along, and Katey stomping (now on a carpet protector, better sound!) the beat out to drive it on to a powerful climax. We all wipe a bit of sweat off our brows, catch our breath, and Katie explains the next bit - how she wrote it for a large group (an oddly instrumented large group) and had to cut it down for the trio - and they proceed to wreck us all over again.

The intensity of the music, the singing strings on the leads and multiple string bowings for chords and the dynamics from quiet to loud and back again in the same song, the jazzy and quiet but essential piano accompaniment, the occasionally interesting left hand rhythms all combine to make this unique and fascinating - time flies and the show is over way too soon, even with a few songs in an encore.

There are so many elements and I'm already forgetting many - I'd swear the pianist said he was playing a Macedonian number in 22/8 time, I think I recall obscure arkestars from roughly that neck of the woods into crazy time signatures. Crazy signature or not the music was enthralling and beautiful. The tuning was rapid but consistent between songs and the humidity was brutal on the bows with many broken bowstrings, or are they threads? One song used a simplified D-G-D-G tuning (if I recall) and Katie made getting into and out of that tuning quickly while keeping the patter going seem effortless so even with fairly major tuning changes the show moved right along.

It's rare that I stay engaged with music that has no verbal component - no lyrics, no voices singing, that's OK we had strings singing and crying and laughing and a piano chuckling and pounding and alternating and playing and themes running around all over the place. The show was very satisfying and I'm glad I got the tip from work, I don't see enough variety and I surely don't see enough good fiddle music. Musicians this talented are worth seeing no matter what they're playing, so getting to hear the old familiar music from my childhood or at least it's cousins played that well made me realize how much I miss hearing some of the varieties of music I grew up on. Time to get out to Maltby for another bluegrass fix, I think. Maybe that will hold me until McNally gets back to town.