New DIT Sessions as of 6-29-12. More at DITsessions.com
DIT Sessions #7
Arms Akimbo – “Cigarettes”
http://armsakimbokalamazoo.bandcamp.com/
DIT Sessions #8
Arms Akimbo – “Southern States”
New DIT Sessions! Arms Akimbo!
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Monthly Archives: June 2012
Friday Night Rock and/or Roll at Fat Guy House
Coming up at the Fat Guy House on Friday, we’ve got something a little different for the house, something less on the punk side.
On tour from Columbus, OH, are two bands that vary pretty greatly from each other: the crooning, country-fried stylings of the aptly-named Steamboat and the amped-up, East-coast style, noodly emo of Squeamish.
Local acts Jake Simmons and the Little Ghosts and the Honey Pot will be joining the Ohio bands. Arguably the two best best bands in the Garage-rock realm of Kalamazoo, both acts are known for their spot-on delivery live.
All kinds of solid music on this one and it’s going to be a party for sure. Come on down, get down. Bring some dollars to donate to the touring bands.
7/1 – Мища, Itto, Seventeen Again, Great American Witchhunt @ Victory House 9pm
A great Victory House show!
Featuring…
Touring bands Мища from Baltimore MD and Itto from Chicago IL.
With help from our MI locals…
Seventeen Again and Great American Witchhunt.
What’s going down is below.
Мища – Hardcore from Baltimore
Check Out Their Bandcamp!
Or the Facebook
Itto – Chicago Hardcore
“Itto is the sonic exertions of all our hopes, dreams, trials, and tribulation.”
Check Out Their Bandcamp!
Or the Facebook
Seventeen Again – Recent Hardcore Kalamazoo Supergroup.
You’ll have to be there to witness this sound for yourself.
Great American Witchhunt – Hardcore with a twist.
Victory House
9pm
Donate to the Touring Bands!
Respect the House.
Respect Yourself and Others.
6/27 – Soft sounds and sharp tones at No Fun House
Chicago is coming. It’s coming to Kalamazoo. It’s bringing music with it. Not the blues though. No, it’s different than that. But it’s good.
Real good.
Folk music that borders on spoken word sometimes, mania other times, and brilliant musicianship all the time, Perpetual Dusk at Curtsy Caverns is making some cool sounds with whatever they’ve got. Very excellent.
Also from the Chitown, Bowl of Dust brings the folk-Americana, and brings it strong. Great songwriting, twangin’ guitars, and calming vocals singing old tunes about the modern age. Very digable.
LOCAL LEGEND FRANK FUZZ will be performing music with himself. Great performer, and a personal favorite local act. DO NOT MISS, as there is no guarantee that he’ll ever play again!
Finally, Jesse Duke will be making his first show appearance in nearly 2 years! Good times to be had by all!
The SHOW will immediately be preceded by a POTLUCK at 7, so bring some FOOD to SHARE. Also, if you could stack some bills up for to toss in to the hats of the wayfairing musicians, that’d be pretty stellar, too.
Hope to see y’alls!
6/26 Ramshackle Glory, Lincoln County War, Son Drop, and Tim Tapper and the Terribles @ Milhouse
Has the sizzle-snap hiss of insects dying a humid death in blue-bleakness of a bug zapper have you hankering for a humble hootenanny DIT readers, listeners, watchers, (whatever)? Tomorrow night, at Milhouse, Ramshackle Glory, Lincoln County War, Son Drop, along with Tim Tapper and the Terribles, are planting a raging blue liberty spike atop the cowboy hat of country music.
Ramshackle Glory is a seven-piece punk band out of Tuscon, AZ, formed by Pat the bunny of DIY note. However somewhere along the way to the Midwest, an irate Southern Illinois farmer mugged the group, took their electric guitars, and left them with just enough money for some aging instruments at the local pawnshop. Equipped with trumpet, banjo, accordion, and piano, Ramshackle Glory’s sound could be cousin to that of Streetlight Manifesto if one were to replace the dramatized ska for working class twang. Songs such as “More about alcoholism,” lyrics like “Carl Marx in my bedroom alone,” and just plain poetic verses like “lick my dirty balls,” impress a swaggering tone that burns like the end of a bottle of Jim Beam and leaves you just as blearily satisfied.
Lincoln County War, a duo comprised of Benjamin Myers on guitar and Sofia peters on violin, are folks playing folk all about killing folks. Driven, loud, and surprisingly violent, the two have a fiery approach to twiddling fiddling. Tearing up while screaming along to their battered, bumpy, country road of a set will be appropriate.
If the sweating and swearing of the other groups gets listeners grabbing for their heart medication, then Son Drop (sans founder and lead-man James Duke) will lull listeners in with a porch-rocking, foot tapping tone. With slurred up renditions of “Sunshine” and a sound like pickled surf-rock played as heard through a soup can, Son Drop will have listeners staring at the ceiling reminiscing of basements past. While Duke won’t be there, this is the first time these boys have played in over a year, so it will be interesting to see what they pull out of their hats.
Tim Tapper and the Terribles are a three piece group formed around Kalamazoo singer-songerwriter Tim Tapper, with the ever-loving Jarad “Saxsquatch” Selner on drums and poster-extraordinaire Rory Svekric, of the Almanac Shouters, on bass. This three-piece will be something to check out, Tapper promising a more “upbeat, charged up” performance differing from the solo stuff he usually produces.
Show starts at 8 p.m. Don’t trash the house. Bring donations, although the music is free. Hooligans.
6/23 Glowfriends & Cardboard Highway….(at Biggby?)
Hark! A Wee Poster!
Resonating with the ambient hum of youth and glitter, Glowfriends has prepared a show this Saturday for thine listening enjoyment. What’s that? Haven’t seen them and whilst in the proper–upbeat–happy-go-lucky state of euphoria necessary to allow their loafer-gazing sound to wash over sparkling electrified eyeballs? Fear not, for this show is at BIGGBY (on Stadium Drive). If coffee doesn’t cut it, well, we here at DIT do not recommend substance abuse. Eyes may taped open and smiles may be pried open with fingers. Expect forceably upraised eyebrows.
Caffeinate those cavernous craws and enjoy the free show (yes, free) and the Kalamazoo premiere of Cardboard Highway, which, according to lead vocalist April Zimont of Glowfriends, is a “special surprise.” It is an all ages show, so get the heads out of the gutter, and mind the cussin’.
Show starts at 7 p.m., caffeine starts always.
And now for a music video to rally the summer mood.
6/20 – Everything’s Louder in Texas (or the Globe Theater, depending)
Tonight, the rock is coming up, and all the way up, from the land of classic westerns and the Delorean Automobile. How can you argue with that?
Short answer? You can’t. Here’s why.
CHOIRS is loud, fast, energetic, with a little bit of chaos and noise thrown in for measure. Their screamo, like Bruce Lee’s kung fu, is superior.
MOTHS could be ambient, but they’re too busy being melodically hardcore instead. Cool, clean guitars. Serious vocals. Lots of power. Danger, Will Robinson.
GEORGE COSTANZA does whatever he wants. Including playing music. Presumably, that’s what’s going on tonight.
Show starts at 9pm and DOESN’T COST A DANGED DIME. It’s occuring below Shakespeare’s Pub in the Globe Theater. It will be good times, man, so come on out and have you one.
Courtesy http://geekology.com
Singing Songs off The Shoulder of Orion: An Interview with Sam Cook-Parrott
If Sam Cook-Parrott is anything, it’s prolific. With a catalogue of one album, three EPs, and a bunch of other ‘albumettes’ floating about under the name Radiator Hospital, his primary band–and that’s not including other bands he associates with like Photographers and Strawberry Heritage–Cook-Parrott’s bubblegum punk projects are leaking out of Grand Rapids and into music scenes across the Midwest.
With music on websites such as bandcamp and cllct.com, and with a recent release, Welcome To The Jungle, under local cassette/digital distributor extraordinaire Already Dead Tapes, Cook-Parrott has implanted his sound here in Kalamazoo.
My first contact with the artist was when I was cobbling together a film project, and his song “Michael & Barbara” caught my ear. I had discovered Cook-Parrott after local Strutt Booking Manager Andy Catlin shared the song on his site disclaiming “Dude writes wicked songs!” Well, how can one resist “wicked songs?” The bounding guitar and pleading vocals of “Michael & Barbara” seem reminiscent of a lonely kid on his couch trying to shake away some depressive doldrums with his only two friends: a guitar and his television—something that fit the mood of the solitary record store I was trying to portray. I got a hold of Cook-Parrott and he gave the go-ahead for using “Michael & Barbara” in my film.
Later, I would wrangled a few words from him in a subsequent interview, intrigued by the at-home, cassette-like hiss, and sci-fi femme fatal fascination that has been a consistent theme for all of his records.
While working on multiple projects such as Winter Break and Strawberry Heritage the (latter formed with Frontier Ruckus member John Hanson) CP explained that Radiator Hospital is his main project and subsequently how it began. Like so many others, the project had its origins in another band. “I had a band (Cookie Bumsted), in high school, that was like me and a bunch of friends. That sort of died out–not everyone was interested anymore,” he said.
Sam Cook-Parrot, for those that are not familiar.
Afterwards, Cook-Parrott wanted to revitalize the songs Cookie Bumsted had played. “I thought it would fun to record all these songs we had and record in a different way, playing the instruments myself. Prince did it all himself. The Toms, a band from from the 70’s and 80’s, did it all themselves–that is the stuff that influenced me. Except it sound nothing like that; it ended sounding like typical lo-fi.”
This inspired Cook-Parrott to write on his own, eventually forming Radiator Hospital as a solo project with that same bedroom, lo-fi sound. “I ended up making a band that was bed-room rock and then sort of a punk band playing all these songs.”
As a result, Welcome To The Jungle, I Want To Believe, Can You Feel My Heart Beating?, and Nothing In My Eyes, amongst a flurry of random collections of singles and compilations, were produced under the Radiator Hospital sigil. Most of the earlier work was written by CP on his own, but eventually he just “wanted to play the songs live,” and formed a band around the music.
Radiator Hospital gathers much of its inspiration from the femmes of fiction. From the likes of Agent Scully (X-Files) to Rachael Tyrell (Blade Runner), female characters from film and television emblazon his album covers in a style reminiscent of The Smiths trademark: an old picture with a band-name. Cook-Parrott says he “likes the imagery of it, the idea of it. I am into cool sci-fi stuff, for the covers of the records [the women] are really strong image of this really beautiful girl looking at you.”
All of this is an “homage,” explains CP, “about how these people are a part of my life–even though they aren’t because I don’t know them.”
“There have been periods of time where I have spent days or weeks just watching X-files and writing songs.”
There is a fascination with fiction in CP’s writing, a desire for a world that only exists in the static glow of a television, and which he attempts to convey with the hiss-hum of his lo-fi pop. “I love the melodrama—stuff like ‘this moment is the most important moment of all time’ or ‘if this kiss doesn’t happen we’ll all die,’ and of course that isn’t how it is, but sometimes you do live those moments, as silly as that may be.”
For those interested in checking out Radiator Hospital, Strawberry Heritage, or any other of Sam Cook-Parrott’s work, just visit radiatorhospital.bandcamp.com or strawberryheritage.bandcamp.com, or see him play June 25th at the Old Dog Tavern with Strawberry Heritage.
Drop By This Saturday To Cool Off with Some Jams
-Tut Tut Looks Like Rain-
WE ARE POSTPONING THE POOL PARTY UNTIL EARLY NEXT WEEK
WE DON’T WANT TO RUST
FURTHER BULLETINS AS EVENTS WARRANT
THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO LET US BORROW THINGS AND USE THE SPACE
The volume goes up as the sun goes down , come celebrate! Another one of us kids transforms into a adult butterfly, no more X’s on hands at shows! Hosted by Paula Koskinen at the corner of Cedar and Pearl; kiddie pools, shade, popsicles and fat beatz provided, Come Say Hi or Take a Dip. We might have friends performing stunts with fire and a projector going in the nighttime. See Ya there!
New DIT Sessions – Esto
Esto – “On My Way”
http://estomagic.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/estomagic
Esto – “Sea Sick”
DITKalamazoo 