Twin Sister, Ava Luna and Lemolo at the Vera Project

On a Tuesday in early February I dropped by the Vera Project after work for the Programming Committee meeting and ended up volunteering to stay to work "Lead Front Door" (basically selling tickets) for the Twin Sisters, Ava Luna and Lemolo show later that night. I'd heard good things about Lemolo, a local band, although I'd never actually heard them. Twin Sister and Ava Luna were new to me which is cool, I like hearing bands I know nothing about.

I set my video camera up on the catwalk and snuck into the venue on occasion to take pictures. First up was Lemolo, a duo with two women, one mostly playing drums and the other trading off between guitar and keyboards and singing.

They had a nice full sound which can be a little challenging for a duo and played fun upbeat songs that were catchy.

The audience turned out early for the local band which was a little unusual, they usually trickle in more for the later bands. Apparently Lemolo is popular locally, which makes sense - I'd heard of them before I actually ever heard them play and it's usually the other way round.

Next up was Ava Luna. They had six performers on stage playing guitar, bass, drums, a couple of keyboards, and a vocalist. More than one of them sang so they were able to get some interesting harmonies and vary their sound by using different lead vocalists.

They tended towards a more deliberate pacing and a surprisingly stripped down sound for having so many instruments. The dynamics in this one are interesting, with the beat on the drums always present and the other instruments joining in and then dropping back out repeatedly, isolating the vocals and drums on occasion.

I enjoyed their set, and their thoughtful, introspective approach. The sound had more variety and dynamics than most bands use, which was a nice change of pace.

Twin Sister took the stage for the headlining set. Unfortunately I was only able to see a short bit of the set, since I had to catch the last bus home. What I did see was interesting; they had 5 people on stage playing drums, bass, guitar and keyboards with a woman doing lead vocals.

For this song (the only one I managed to get) they have an interesting spacey synthesizer driven opening (the guitarist plays some synth during the opening too) that builds and swells, then fades into the background a it as the vocals and drums carry the middle section. The video goes wonky half way through - a wooden panel fell over onto my tripod and broke it (dang!) so there's no visual, but you can still hear the est of the song.

So I got to see a fun show, although I had to leave too soon to see the last act, and losing my tripod was a bit of a bummer. Considering how many times I've taken multiple cameras into mosh pits I guess I have to consider myself pretty lucky, this is the fist time I've lost any equipment and I've got a spare tripod so it's not that big of a deal.

Peter Stampfel, Jeffrey Lewis, and Dust Busters with Kristin Andreassen at the Vera Project

Jaime tipped us off about the show Friday night in January at the Vera. We filed into the Vera Project out of the night and set our equipment up, saying "hi" to Starr as we came in. The cat walk visuals and sound work well, the acoustic bluegrass/new grass with mild amplification gives a clean accurate sound that is easy to capture.


My pictures were shakier, though.

Dust Busters kicked things off with Kristin Andreassen dancing and playing harmonica, singing and playing guitar too I think.

The dancing added quite a bit, it worked as a beat/rhythm part as she tapped away on some of the songs. A variety of guitars, fiddles, banjos, and harmonicas were employed by various band members, usually without drums or a rhythm section.

Jeffrey Lewis was selling comic books, and he used his drawings in his performance too. He started out doing some witty acoustic guitar singer songwriter material

Comics (he sells Fuff comics, which he also writes) informed his musical material, so does his sardonic sense of humor. He did some drawings inspired by an assortment of obscure psychedelic songs and showed them to us on the projector screen behind the stage while he played short samples of the odd songs with each image. He also couched down and sang an a capella bit to some comic material, you can find that on my youtube channel somewhere.

Lewis brought Stampfel and a fiddler from the Dust Busters on for several songs and also charmed me with a song about his band ambitions in the final 4 or so minutes. Fuck that man! 'cause we're a rock and roll band! In spite of the heroin addiction, you kind of do want to be in his band.


Peter Stampfel came on and played his unique brand of bluegrass/rock music. The sax is cool, and the layering of instruments and Stampfel's unique vocal approach, wailing and nearly yodeling wordlessly.

The energy and power is wonderful. Happy rolling cowboy brings that kind of yodeling yipping out to full effect.


Douchebag is probably my favorite:

Wonderful chorus, yes sir! When he gets to wailing about hackers stealing all the e-mails it takes on a wonderful nearly demented quality, and now they're frying 'em. Wonderful, powerfully odd. Not much like anything else I've listened to recently, the Maltby bluegrass pot-luck monthly show is traditional bluegrass and otherwise I really just don't listen to that much bluegrass.

To me, "sounds like nothing I've heard recently" is praise. They've managed to stake some new territory, taking me to a different style that's new to me. I like that!

Posting Mechanics

I posted about quite a few shows last year, and any passionate hobby starts to become less play and more work as the total number of hours spent on it passes forty in any given week. I'm not exactly whinging well, only whining a little, I suppose. Going to multi-day festivals (Sasquatch, CHBP, Bumbershoot) and taking hours of video and hundreds of photos a day was fun and occasionally grueling, and I built up "media wrangling debt."

Getting 2 or 3 hours of video footage groomed down to identified bands performing one or two numbers, properly uploaded, titled, tagged and licensed on youtube, photos up on flickr, videos off of SLR onto youtube rather than flickr, audio files identified and labelled, backups of audio, video and photos onto local external HD, refs generated for embedding into blogs, all that has to be slogged through before writing and posting the blog. Half the time I needed the videos to remind me which acts I saw when, and what they sounded like. I have now had the charming experience of wrangling files from a performance a semi-missed that kicked my ass in retrospect. I was there to start the recording, but I was busy doing something like making tacos so I didn't actually experience the performance live. Later as I uploaded all of the files I listened to an audio recording and the song was excellent, I was floored by what I had missed. I don't even know who it was, and I don't have a good method nailed down for posting audio, so you'll have to take my word for it - it was a fascinating experience.

I haven't "solved" using audio in my blogs, but using videos with youtube and photos with flickr couldn't be easier (once the content is uploaded, anyway) and I can link anything in that tickles my fancy so the blogging process is mostly pretty good.

In this last week the winter storm and its aftermath made the internet based tools I rely on unreliable and I was reminded how much I take for granted. My camera takes better pictures than I could if I had to do it manually and it's easy to take piles of photos, post them on flickr, and use them in my blogs.
No negatives to mail in, no physical prints to pay (and wait) for, no need to scan for on-line access, they're already digital. Now throw in 60 frame/sec HD video with reasonably good audio that can take high volume situations and still deliver reasonable quality and make that easy to trim, label, tag, upload, and embed. No lab work needed, no physical tapes to send anywhere, as long as the internet is available I can publish word-wide in a few hours. The same week wikipedia and other sites went dark to protest SOPA my internet access went intermittent to unavailable right at the peak of being snowed in and really wishing I had internet access. Nobody was hurt and we kept ourselves occupied, so it really wasn't a big deal, it just brought home to me how thoroughly the internet has ingrained itself into my media production and consumption patterns. It wasn't that big a deal because the internet was back working normally within a day; I do require a functioning internet to publish world-wide for free.