In our lifetimes, we can do lots of things with our time and money; there are always baubles and trinkets to buy, trips to take and meals to eat and these can all be wonderful things. Even so, we feel that one of the best things that we can do with our time and money is to seek out meaningful experiences together and with the Cake Shop shows we host, we aim to do just that. By providing an open space for artists come and play for a select audience, we aim to help musicians get paid for doing what they do and to provide an inimitably intimate experience for music to bring people together. It’s also totally selfish of us, because we get our favorite acts right in our own living room.
For our first Cake Shop show of 2012, we had our first ever returning act, with Caroline Smith and Jesse Schuster of the Good Night Sleeps gracing our living room. After spending the last 10 days in Detroit Lakes writing material for a new record (“Maybe fall?” Caroline joked, “We have no idea.”) the duo were brimming with friendly repartee and took chatty questions from the audiences over both shows. Playing tunes from both their records, 2011′s Little Wind and 2008′s Backyard Tent Set, they also tried out some new material that was very well received; a poetic riff on Annie Hall and what Caroline described as her first attempt to write a soul song. They also covered Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”, which they have been doing at shows for about a year now. Caroline described the feeling of seeing Bon Iver sing the tune on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, declaring with indignation, “Justin Vernon, do you have to win everything?” In response, an audience member called out, “I still prefer yours!”
Saving the last few songs of the set for audience requests, there was a wide mix of unreleased songs and rarities called out, along with some of their more popular and well known songs like “Closing the Doors”. At the early show, this also resulted in a building singalong to the chorus of “Eagles Nest” and as the warm wood in the room reverberated with voices coming together, there was a mutual understanding, to make the most of our time and money, we should welcome together the necessary beauty of song.
We would like to think that we improve with each passing year, we become better, more complex and confident, more polished versions of ourselves, and hope the same for the things we care about. For the Minnesota music scene, to help this assessment along is the annual First Avenue “Best New Bands” showcase, highlighting the acts that our crown jewel venue most enjoyed from the preceding year. On Wednesday night, “Best New Bands” was not only a general consensus (five of the seven acts were also finalists in the last iteration of the City Pages “Picked to Click” poll) but also something of an understatement. When Local Current journalist Andrea Swensson noted from stage that she thought that, “Minnesota music is on an upswing”, it meant that the momentum from the successes of our past years (Doomtree, Peter Wolf Crier, GAYNGS) has raised the bar on local newness.
Fire in the Northern Firs opened with a woozy, pulsating shoegaze vibe that packed the punch you would expect from a quartet of experienced musicians. With vocalist Carin Barno (formerly of First Communion Afterparty) leading the charge and singing through a microphone embedded in a telephone receiver at points, the drive of the songs was wrapped up in her lusty energy that saw her lunging across stage while wailing about booze, love and blow. For the still-gathering crowd who showed up early, it was a heady way to kick off the night and set a high standard for the bands to follow.
If Barno and Fire in the Northern Firs brought a sexy rock n’ roll mess onstage, then Sexcat pulled out the electronica dance stops. Tongue (mostly) in cheek, Hannah von der Hoff and Megan Charles cooed and breathed heavy sweet nothings in our collective ears. “Your job tonight, Minneapolis, is to dance,” von der Hoff proclaimed from stage, and although 8:30 on a Wednesday may have been a little to early and a little too sober for most, it didn’t stop Sexcat from vamping it up like a more-chaste Peaches or Enigma with a libido and a bong.
Dream Crusher may have been missing Jacob Mullis of Fort Wilson Riot (in Arizona recording a new album) but with 10 men onstage and a cameo from Sean Anonymous of Wide Eyes and Ashley Gold, they weren’t wanting for sound. Keeping everything tight for Dream Crusher were the double drumming skills of Mo McNichols and Jared Isabella, while Jacob Grun of Me and My Arrow emoted via auto-tune such as to make Bon Iver proud. For a band of ad hoc membership and often no set path, this was one of the most passionate, cohesive and beautifully ambient acts of the night.
Then came the real veterans. Gramma’s Boyfriend consists of Haley Bonar, who put out a wonderful record in Golder last year, guitar whiz Jeremy Ylvisaker, multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Mike Lewis on bass and the Hanson brothers, Jacob and Jeremy, on guitar and drums respectively, meaning there is altogether too much serious talent in that band, and they have to blow off steam somehow. So when Bonar came out in a pair of giant mom jeans (and she is a new mother) with an enormous fake derriere emblazoned with the sly logo “LARDACHE”, just chalk it up to her needing to be the anti-Karen O of art punk and let some septuagenarian freak flag fly.
Night Moves made it up next, fresh off the buzz that they had signed up with Domino Records in order to release their Colored Emotions debut and with a hearty recommendation as the cure to your love life troubles from Chase Mathey of Radio K. With their shaggy hair and over-sized shirts, they looked and sounded their part of the MGMT-spearheaded psych revival, falling into some mix of disco-era Stones and Pink Floyd harmonies over the course of their set. Although their sound is now an amalgam of sounds past, these are a creative bunch with some great bands under their belts (Mouthful of Bees, Battle Royale) so there’s no counting on what John Pelant, Mark Ritsema and Mickey Alfaño might do next.
If playing the First Avenue Mainroom is really the top honor in the Cities, then you had better make the most of the moment, and Bloodnstuff did just that. In front of a packed house, drummer Dylan Gouert and guitarist/vocalist Ed Holmberg absolutely owned the room from the get-go, using a wall of amplifiers and double floor toms to tear everything around them apart. With their sinewy, massive hooks, wailing guitar lines, open-throated screaming and devastating prog drums, these guys were unstoppable. DJ Jason Nagel of Cities 97 noted before their set that they had just reached their Kickstarter goal to fund their new record, but with four more days to go, that epic performance should earn them, as Nagel put it, “a few more shekels.”
Closing out the night (albeit to a slightly diminished house, the more’s their loss) was new hip-hop hope MaLLy. Currently nestled under the warm wing of Atmosphere (Slug is a fan, from appearing in videos to wearing a MaLLy T at Soundset last year) this young MC came across powerfully, like a The College Dropout-era Kanye, full of stories about his own hustle and family. With enough swagger and bite to claim that “if I was white, I would have been signed in ’07,” MaLLy was also moved enough by the crowd response to claim that he “wouldn’t be shit” without the fan support. If that brief flash on the Mainroom stage is any indication and with a record coming this spring, MaLLy’s going to be a lot more.
First Avenue was also showing off a bit of its own newness over the course of the night. From debuting the new Members Area for the inaugural run of the membership program to radically increasing space and visibility by removing the staircase that used to be in the center of the floor, the Mainroom was looking and feeling a fresher place, the venerable venue taking what it already did so well and making it better. If a venue can do that, then surely bands can and from fresh faces to new projects from old hands, the night was as much as we could have hoped for, and we always hope to be surprised and impressed like that.
The Twin Cities prides itself as a musical cauldron, where styles blend together to form something grander, more interesting than simply the sum of their parts. Punk-rock rappers? Got ‘em. Blues-inflected hip-hop? Yep. Country-soul roots singers? Right here.
Enter singer-songwriter Pat Dougherty and his project, Fairfax, AK. Starting off on the West Bank and recording in an attic in Frogtown, Dougherty talks about the group as a folk act with punk rock energy. Dougherty plays guitar and sings, Dave Afdahl kicks in piano and vocals, Tim Binger plays cello, Joe Finstrom plays bass and Andy Myers takes percussion and their first record, Love Stories and Picture Shows is out today. Instead of being a loose anarchic mix of a disc, Love Stories and Picture Shows is a sweet, cohesive collection of tunes that owe as much to the singer-songwriters of the mid-90s as the folky 60s and punk 70s. It’s a record that slips in an surprises you, like a polished up, lyrically focused take on Spirits of the Red City, or a Hootenanny with an orchestral band. Their appropriately eclectic CD release is this Friday at the Nomad World Pub along with Ghostmouth, Silverback Colony and Sans Aura.
CakeIn15: Tell us a little about yourself. How do you come to find yourself making a record in a house in Frogtown?
Pat Daugherty: I moved to Minneapolis from the Philly area. I stayed in the West Bank for a few years, but then moved to an apartment in Lowertown. One day I bought a Hammond organ on impulse and then realized I had no way of getting that thing back to Saint Paul, so I asked Dave if I could keep it in his storage closet [on the West Bank]. Andy already kept his drum kit in there, so I ended up hanging out in that storage unit a lot, writing songs and adding drums with a loop pedal I had. Eventually we had band practices in that tiny, little space. I forget how the five of us even fit in there.
As for the record, a while back my buddy John Peters and I were looking to start a pirate radio station in Saint Paul. He found this house in Frogtown and built an awesome studio in the attic. We set up an internet stream and named it Radio Noir after the radio show I had in college, and for about a year we would record and broadcast house shows every Sunday. That got kind of crazy. After a few months we had bands from all over the country and even Europe playing and sleeping in that house week after week, but that’s another story entirely…
Eventually Radio Noir wound down and we had a perfectly good studio just sitting there, so we took the songs out of the storage closet and into the attic.
C15: Is Fairfax, AK down the highway from Halloween, Alaska? Where did the name come from?
PD: Haha yeah, Halloween is a few exits down on the Alaska Highway. There’s a rest stop about halfway with a great diner! I guess I didn’t realize that connection. Perhaps in the distant future someone will curate a festival consisting of acts named after fictional towns in Alaska.
I wish I had some sort of crazy story involving a bottle of whiskey and a moose with a snow blower, but the name came from a much more anticlimactic place. About a year ago I was going through one of those “What does it all mean?” kind of things. I had always been drawn to Alaska, and I figured I had already moved halfway across the country once, so doing it again couldn’t be that scary.
Before I pulled a Chris McCandless, I wanted to do a little research. In my head I wanted to go to Fairfax. No idea why that town popped up but it seemed like the perfect solution, except for the fact it doesn’t exist. I could have sworn there was a Fairfax, Alaska. It seemed so real! I knew I heard it before. At least I thought I did.
The whole ordeal was funny to me. Probably because the concept of something feeling so familiar and real but nonexistent summed up a lot of things in my life at that point, so rather than abruptly ending a relationship of three years and abandoning my post as a teacher to flee to Alaska, I thought I’d name a band after it instead.
C15: Steve McClellan said you might be “the loudest folk act” he has ever heard. Do you consider yourself a folk act? What does that mean to you? Who are your folk?
PD: Steve is a good guy. There’s a funny story about that quote. Steve got me my first gigs in the Twin Cities, and one night he was looking for a last minute fill-in for an acoustic show. The band and I had already been working on stuff, so I said I had a folk act that could play. We didn’t even have a name at that point. In fact I think the flyer he made said something to the tune of “And Pat Dougherty’s Project.”
The bill was 3 singer-songwriters and us. We played first. After our set, he came up to us and said, “That might have been the loudest folk act I have ever heard.” I replied, “Ya know, Steve, we might just use that in our press kit.”
I don’t know why we’re so loud. We don’t use amps. I suppose we just play really hard, but what’s the point of playing if you’re not going to play hard?
I still consider us a folk act, despite our loud tendencies. I deeply respect the traditions of folk music. It’s why I wrote “This Machine Still Kills Fascists” on my guitar, but folk music isn’t limited to a certain set of chords or cadences.
Folk music has always been something much bigger than that. It’s a vehicle for people to say something they need to say. It’s telling a story the only way you know how to. It’s very personal music not unlike punk or hip hop. It’s music for the folks by the folks, hence the name.
C15: You are releasing Love Stories and Picture Shows this week, what are your hopes and dreams for the record?
PD: I feel like you can’t really know if you like or dislike a record without listening to it a few times, so I just hope people give it a good three listens. If you like what you hear, I’d love to see you at a show sometime.
C15: Who, local or national, live or dead, would be on your dream bill?
PD: Oh, this is a tough question. For current artists, I’d say anything Jeff Tweedy is involved in. Out of the songwriters in the world, I probably steal from him the most, haha! As for artists of the past, I would have loved to be involved with the Last Waltz, but then again I might have to say GG Allin just so I’d have a story to tell later.
C15: What is something that you see, artistically or personally, that the Twin Cities needs more of?
PD: A bigger respect for the DIY scene. There is so much amazing art being made in the Cities, and a lot of it gets overlooked because it doesn’t get played on a certain radio station or get written about in a certain paper. Don’t be afraid to take the road less traveled. Go to a house show. See a band you’ve never heard of, and if you like it don’t be afraid to support it. It’s your opinion. You’re the one whose right not everybody else. Don’t let someone else’s opinion influence your own. Especially mine.
“For those of you keeping score,” Johnny Solomon announced from the Triple Rock stage, “it’s a Beck’s Non-Alcoholic.” For a guy just coming off one year of sobriety and a band that has practiced five times in the last five years, Friends Like These kept it together well for their ten-song reunion set on Friday night. The show had been a long, strange time coming, as Andrea Swensson detailed in great longform article last week for the Local Current – and for really how long and strange, check out this 2004 Friends Like These City Pages cover story by Melissa Maerz.
Sporting a t-shirt that read “Who the fuck is Johnny Solomon?”, there was a genuine excitement from both the band and the crowd, as well as more than a little self-effacing nostalgia. Looking out into the cheering crowd and grinning, “I used to be somebody,” Solomon quipped. Later on in the set, when pitching the fact that although there was no FLT merch to be had despite promises of a remastered best-of compilation earlier, Solomon noted that Communist Daughter gear was available for sale, adding scathingly, “We do this professionally.” Guitarist Adam Switlick, who also does double-duty in both bands, got in on the action saying, “We’re not that good, we don’t try very hard.” Solomon jibed back, “That was really emo of you.”
Even though all that may not be true, trying hard isn’t always enough to break big, as Solomon & co. can attest to, although it might be enough to keep from crashing again. Back in 2004, Maerz quoted a drunk Solomon pleading with a Boston bouncer after an unfriendly show, “Give us free drinks. Give us five fucking dollars. Give us something. Give us our pride, at least.” There was no need to plead on Friday, except from the crowd, filled with members of Tapes n’ Tapes, We Became Actors, openers Wishbook and other local musical mainstays, who demanded another ten songs at the end of the set. And with the year under his belt and great night with the band, everyone could walk offstage with their pride and good adrenaline buzz. It may only be rock n roll, but it’s good clean fun.
Looking for a Missing Employee is the kind of performance that could have easily taken place over coffee and cigarettes in a café on the Beirut Corniche. In the second show of the Out There 2012 at the Walker Art Center, Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué takes the audience on an almost two-hour long meander through the 1996 newspaper records of a missing employee in the Lebanese Ministry of Finance, Rafa’at Suleiman, and in doing so, creates a personable if not particularly personal exploration of the rule of law and the absurdities of of political machinations in Lebanon. It’s a topic that should feel a lot more pressing right now, but, as the piece was originally performed in 2005 and based as it is in newspaper clippings from 15 years ago and trafficking in jokes on translation, Mroué’s performance comes across with a more of a nostalgic irony and warmth than a fire of contemporary politics.
Mroué was the winner of the Spalding Gray Award in 2010, and the stage set up would have been well familiar to the attending local arts patrons, dancers and performance artists. As with Gray, there was a table and chair at center stage, with a small screen behind the set pieces and a large projection screen filling the rest of the stage. However, instead of sitting in front of the audience, Mroué sat in the back of the McGuire auditorium with two video cameras on him, one to project his face onto the small screen and another above his desk to project the the notebooks and clippings onto the right-hand side of the large screen. On the left-hand side of the large screen, collaborator Ghassan Halawani’s drawings charting out the obscure and conflicting rumors and countering official stories, denunciations and retractions involved in the story. This video distancing winds up being not as interesting as it might have been. In the end, we are still watching a live performance (at one point Mroué supposedly lost his place) but the edited frames through which we experience the show are a subtle reminder that as with the content of the newspaper clippings, we may not be getting the full story.
The facts, such as they may be, are these: Rafa’at Suleiman was a minor official in the Lebanese Department of Finance, who disappeared from his office on either the 25th or 26 of September, 1995. His wife, Wafa’, placed an article in the paper demanding that if her husband had been murdered, of “disappeared” by the government, it was her right to know. After that demand, the stories started to flow about a embezzled money, reports of which ranged anywhere from 3.5 billion Lebanese pounds to 43 billion Lebanese pounds and a plot to defraud the government by circulating forged stamps. A series of newspaper reports come out painting Suleiman as everything from a high-flying bon vivant whose motto was “Spend what you have in your pocket today, let tomorrow come what may,”as Mroué translated for us, to quiet, generous man to a scheming thief. The Minister of Finance and the Minister of Refugees are drawn into a spat over the lost money, the Prime Minister demands answers, the family demands answers and the newspapers keep on printing stories about the affair. Eventually, news of Suleiman’s murder surfaces, the body is found and this boondoggle of secular law has a heartbreaking and stomach-turning coda of Islamic law regarding the burial of the body and the lack of prayers for Suleiman in the end.
The performance turns on a phrase that bookended the night; “The point of this performance is not to find the truth or untruth…the difference between the truth and the lie is a hair, I am trying to split that hair.” Dealing with information in much the same way as his Lebanese contemporaries The Atlas Group, nothing in the performance is particularly to be trusted, except for the fundamental point that nothing is particularly to be trusted. Both The Atlas Group and Franz Kafka, whose convoluted bureaucracies and faceless interrogations pervade the Levant, get mentions in the performance, if only through denial. One of the suspects arrested and interrogated was named Joseph K., but despite sharing a name with the protagonist of The Trial, Mroué denied the Kafka connection, while one of the police officers involved in an assassination is named Alia Raad, who Mroué emphatically stated is not related to Walid Raad, founder of The Atlas Group, a joke I think only Walker curator Philip Bither and I laughed at. To split the hair even further, Mroué carried on that vein by saying that Faris Khisham, a reporter on the Suleiman beat, was not related to Rabih Mroué. Why would he say that? Because maybe this things are the same. Maybe they appear different but share the same context, a reporter trying to piece together the full story, a people trying to see the lines between truth and untruth and draw them, or blur them.
Early in Looking for a Missing Employee, Mroué says that the missing person, being both present and not present, that is, both dead and not dead, is fertile ground for exploration. It is also an emotionally powerful, politically resonant and ongoing series of demands. The Mothers of the Disappeared in Buenos Aires made that lack of presence their presence in demanding the return of their sons and daughters. Egyptian author and essayist Alaa El Aswany has made the false presence of democracy the focus of many of his critiques, while still signing off all of his columns with the phrase “Democracy is the answer”. For a truly Kafka-esque look at an everyday death, read his article “Who Is Killing The Poor In Egypt?”, collected in On The State of Egypt. The quiet, searching irony of Looking for a Missing Employee is a warm and human survival skill in the face of violence and absurd machinations, but feels like not quite enough at a time when the world is so far and so fast in motion.
Fortunately, Mroué has come prepared with a new Walker commission, The Pixelated Revolution, which will be presented on Saturday morning at 11AM and deals with the current revolution in Syria. The program notes ask “Are the broken-up and incomplete images sent by the Syrians an extension of their physical experience? Is the mobile phone an extension of their brains, of their body, of their being?” Staring at the computer screen, considering last night’s performance and about to tweet this and post it to facebook, even though I am not in Syria and do not fear that my government will directly kill me, there is enough uncertainty in life that we might as well go ahead and split the hair.
It’s been a good week for music videos from local bands, and here you go! We’ve watched them, as the saying goes, so you don’t have to. But you really should, if only for the music. And so that you can imagine RoboCop in all of them.
This lovely, flitting, quietly psychedelic video fits Poliça’s sound to a T and could really only be made better if halfway through, in a burst of smoke and autotune, Channy re-appeared as RoboCop and blew Mike Noyce away for the murder of her partner in a drug bust gone wrong. If only you had that skill. The ability to see through walls and identify potentially dangerous enemies is going to come in handy for you when you try to break in to First Ave for their sold-out Current birthday party show on the 28th.
Speaking of quality apocalyptic flashbacks from the 80s, Phantom Tails treats us not so much to a music video as channel surf through the best of end-of-days from our childhood, ending, fittingly, with RoboCop’s inane TV show tagline, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” iTunes, anyone? Catch PT with Fort Wilson Riot & Hevy Syrup at Hell’s Kitchen on Thursday at 10pm.
Hey America, get stupid! Prof gets silly onscreen to go along with his silly enough tune, “Gampo”. Again, a RoboCop suit would have really made this video, especially since we’ve already got a whole series of flashbacks and vignettes, including Sally Jesse Raphael going on here. Peter Weller was the father, just so you know. Download the whole record for free at Prof’s Bandcamp page.
CakeIn15.com is happy to announce our next house show at The Cake Shop! On Thursday, January 26th at both 6:30pm & 9pm we will be hosting another amazing evening of music by the talented Caroline Smith & Jesse Schuster.
This concert will be limited in capacity, so reserve your space today – this one’s gonna go fast. Ticket cost is $12, and to reserve space, please log into PayPal and send your payment to Cakein15@gmail.com. Please mark your payment as a “GIFT” in order to avoid PayPal fees. This is money going to the artists, so please don’t short-change them! Also PLEASE tell us which show you want to attend – the 6:30pm or 9pm.
Your reservation to this special show is confirmed ONLY when you receive an email both confirming your payment and giving you the house address. This email must come from CakeIn15@gmail.com and NOT Paypal (so make sure to check your spam filter). Guests are invited to bring a beverage of their choice to enjoy.
When: Thursday, January 26th, 2012 Time: 6:30 pm & 9:00pm Where: The Cake Shop, location upon RSVP How much: $12 reservations
The Cake Shop is dedicated to providing artists and audiences with a unique and intimate experience that allows artists to freely experiment with new material. Shows at The Cake Shop directly financially support the musicians playing. Previous performances include Spirits of the Red City, Dark Dark Dark and Elephant Micah, Pezzettino, Roma Di Luna, Jeremy Messersmith, The Pines, Ben Kyle & Carrie Rodriguez, We Are The Willows (Peter Miller), and Chastity Brown.
CakeIn15.com is dedicated to covering and supporting culture issues of importance to the Twin Cities- local music, art, fashion and theater as well as national acts. After all, we do live here.
UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW is glorious. It is ecstatic, roiling, honest, hilarious, heartbreaking and aside from one uproariously grotesque blowjob scene, nigh-on family friendly. The show, by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, is a commision by the Walker Art Center and is the first in their four-weekend Out There 2012: Global Visionaries Festival, opening the event with bang.
Dancers in action, left-right: Regina Rocke, Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo), World Famous *BOB*, Katy Pyle, Hilary Clark. Not pictured: Becca Blackwell.
It almost feels cruel to write about the show because so much wants to come tumbling out, so filled with spoilers, and this is a show where words aren’t going to cut it at all. Aside from some “las” and a lullabye in what might have been Gaelic, performed by Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo) and juxtaposed to total heart-wrenching effect, words don’t work around this dance piece. Lee, an acclaimed playwright, said as much in an interview with the Walker Magazine: “But I felt like it was bad, that the movement conveyed so much more than the words did….Finally I just said, “Screw it; let’s throw it out.” That’s when the show really came into its own. It never wanted it to be a show with words, and I tried to force words on it, but it never wanted them.” UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW works because it remains that way, so devoid of the usual signifiers that ascribe value to us in our daily lives. It is just six naked people on a blank stage. Some great music, some silly pink parasols. Perfect.
Another reason it feels so wrong to write about the show because performance reviews are such a tease, they give you a little part of the show to try and entice (or disinterest) you from seeing the rest. For a show where all six female-bodied performers are naked, this is not a show about teasing, titillation, or even nudity. It is a show about being naked. In John Berger‘s Ways of Seeing, he writes that, “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not be recognized for oneself…Nakedness reveals itself.” This dance is indeed a revelation, perhaps a beautiful reminder of our own bodies, that shocks us back to the truth of things: our lives our complicated, we hold contradictions of desire, comfort and destruction in us, we do what we must to get by. As Lee calls it in her program notes, the dance is an “imaginary utopia of of unlimited transformation,” and a utopia that exists, quite literally, under our everyday surfaces. It’s why we love our summers here, when we get to shed our layers, it brings us one step closer to the clear-eyed honesty of being naked, to seeing the world anew.
Hell, even if you don’t believe me that it’s great, you should at least trust Lou Reed on Young Jean Lee. Go see it, tonight or tomorrow, or maybe both. You’ll want to.
It was a warm and familiar crowd at the Turf Club last night for The Money $hot, mingling and poring over the photos from Erik Hess of Noise Damage and CakeIn15′s own Stacy Schwartz of Staciaann Photography. As the artists busied themselves showing off photo highlights from the past year (or so) with mostly music but some other art shots in the mix, the big irony of the night was that there was no-one shooting the bands.
Fortunately, we managed to catch a couple songs by each of the bands, just to give you a taste of the ecelctic and wonderful line-up of Wizards Are Real, Kruddler, Crescent Moon is in Big Trouble and Iguano that kept the still-decorated Turf twinkling and bouncing. Christy Hunt as DJ Lady Part made sure the moving didn’t stop between bands, throwing on classic 45s and 7 inches to twist the night away. A great night for art, up on the stage, in the air or in a photo, and we should do it again next year. Here’s to 2012!
It is the end of the year and to mark the passing, we’ve compiled a slice of some of our top CakeIn15 posts. That means some of our most commented and most shared posts as well as some that were really just fun to write. We hope you have enjoyed what we’ve been able to bring you, and we look forward to serving it up even more in 2012.
WHAT YOU MISSED…
Max Lohrbach with accessories by Bionic Unicorn and Pink Mink behind
Beirut: “Beirut is a band that fills a room not because they are wild showmen like Gogol Bordello or have the gritty weariness of DeVotchKa, but because Condon’s orchestration, and the musicians he gets to perform with him, feel like a dreamy wanderlust, a bygone courtesy and a stumbled-upon love note.”
St. Vincent at the Walker: “Clark giggled, and we in the audience ate it right up, “I like your spirit Minneapolis. I’ve always liked your spirit.””
Paul Simon: “Simon hasn’t stood still in his time here, and neither should we.”
Voltage 2011: “Strength like that doesn’t pop up overnight and if things are going to change for the fashion industry here in Minnesota, the foundation and momentum of Voltage is a huge gift.”
SXSW coverage from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday Part I & Part II & Saturday: ““I haven’t done this song in five years,” Cecil joked, “And I was like, lets do it. Just throw some Budweiser on it.” If that’s not the South by Southwest spirit, I don’t know what is.”
Chapel Club: ““We’re a very nervous, self-conscious band. I probably shouldn’t admit that. I’m drunk.””
INTERVIEWS
Little Man photo by Emily Utne, Styling by UpSix.
Aloha Dustin Thomas: “If there is anything short of catastrophe that could get people on the same page, it’s gotta be music.”
Oriel: “When you’re not working with other people in a studio and you have your space, you have so much more freedom to experiment and try things and think outside the box.”
Tristen: “…I’m interested in people saying something. I might be the minority in that respect.”
Even If We Never Look Forward: “Making less art. Not kidding. Like really, taking time to make, stop putting a show out because you want to do five a year. That’s a really sassy answer.”
Dan Israel: “Wow. Best question I’ve ever been asked, possibly. No, seriously, kudos!”
Little Man: “…[W]ith this album at this point, I’m up for working my ass off to try and pay for it. I did, but I’m in debt, you know?”
No Bird Sing: “I think the number one thing and one of the things I am going to take on as a personal quest for myself is to use my platform for the greater good.”
John Lennon: ““Love is the answer, and you know that for sure.” That’s a wild idea for a kid to get into his head. I didn’t even know that John was dead then. I know that now. I know that his body is gone. I know that his songs live on.”
Occupy August Wilson: “What is good to know that the conflict and ambiguity of moments of change, which theatre lets us explore in a systematic way, remain omnipresent and are not to be feared.”
September 11, 2001: “Today I think about how it changed our country. How we live in fear, with crazy body scanners at our airports & red, orange & yellow warning levels. How people of a peaceful religion were changed & made out to be some horrible monsters trying to kill us all.”
OK Go & the Muppets: “…[D]ribbling out of the unenthused mouths of OK Go, it just becomes self-fulfilling: “Why do we always come here? I guess we’ll never know. It’s like a kind of torture to have to watch this show.””
Czeslaw’s Loop: “So if the conceit goes away, the show was free to be it’s own thing; a group of serious-looking hipsters standing on a rickety dock staring at an excellent drumline performing with dance party projections and electronic loops on a pontoon under a re-purposed McDonald’s billboard held up by 2x4s as brittle and bowed as fish ribs.”
Save the Southern: “In the end, we can’t be petty and say, “Well, it serves them right”, just to prove a capitalist, free-market point. As others have pointed out, if the Southern were a bank, it would have gotten a bailout, and the process of making art is not a solely an economic function…”
1001 Chairs: “Because we are all in the total animal soup, and it is our time.”
JUST FOR FUN
Wandering Stars: “…if you hit play on both videos simultaneously, you get POLIÇA IN STEREO!”
Espresso Showdown: “Give me my espresso concentrated and explosive, and I’ll go to bat for that any day.”
“Whirring” and the Foo Fighters: “In the end, I just like the positivity shown by Grohl in throwing that initial tweet out there. Even @joyformidable’s response was perfect: “Thanks Dave. Means a lot.”"
