You know what’s better than a birthday party? A birthday dance party.
The Black Lodge is celebrating the new month, and a birthday, with plenty of music to groove to.
Starting at 9 pm, Danger Groove is going to spin his vinyl DJ-set, and play electronic dance music.
Matt Black, a native Kalamazoo artist, will be rapping off his old and new songs. He’ll be giving us a taste of his upcoming release “Oak Street Market.”
Then Boron Nuzzle will play experimental funk-tions, bringing keyboards, guitar, and a sax to the party.
Come on down to the Black Lodge, bring a few dollars for donations, and come see the birthday boy Andy Argo for a night full of very danceable music.
Sugar Baron bring their driving guitars, tidy electronic beats, and lilting soft vocals from Detroit to share with all their Kalamazooan friends. Just take a listen to “Self Saboteur” and imagine how fun this show will be!
Seven Birds One Stone
Seven Birds One Stone (also of Detroit) bring a more organic, slightly funkier brand of rock. Male/female vocal duets, a full rhythm section, and syncopated rhythm guitars guarantee finger wagging and hip shaking.
Decades
Decades have come from Lansing with a van-full of Power Pop, and they’re a welcome reminder of how the great 90’s still are. Punchy guitar-oriented rock songs with layers of strong male vocals and purposeful guitar feedback may remind you of the Gin Blossoms, while the scream-sung choruses evoke the earlier works of the Foo Fighters.
As an appetizer, at 9pm on the dot, the Ghost Bunnies will offer a Kalamazoo-style five-layer casserole whose recipe calls for uptempo rock, galloping percussion, and group singalongs. Includes former members of Who Hit John, Who Are The Owls, and The Philly Crawlers.
Circus Pig
For the pork course, Circus Pig provides their dynamic, unexpected, and occasionally perplexing flavor. Ingredients include wild drums, blasting trumpet, menacing organ, and gritty guitar riffs. Locally grown in Grand Rapids, all organic megaphone vocals and skronks.
Full Frontal Cortez
Served on a bed of melted faces, Full Frontal Cortez dare you to guess the Scoville number of their trademark moshed potatoes, tightly wound power trio noodles, and twice-baked peppy drum fills. FFC is the brainchild of Kalamazoo’s own John “The Legend” Gregory.
Jesse Ray Carolina
Jesse Ray Carolina provides the bittersweet whiskey-soaked hard candy, made with dreams that are still not quite dead, and voices that are not yet broken. JRC hails from Rockford MI, and last year shared his own distinctly American songs with the Farmers Markets of Portland Oregan.
RSVP at the Facebook event page – the show starts at 9PM (sharp)! Please bring a few bucks for merch, or just to support the touring bands.
What better way to say goodbye to the grey month of February will colorful music? With these artists, this night won’t so much of a show as much as it will be an experience to cherish.
Louie’s trophy house presents Glowfriends, husband&wife, and Fiona Dickinson on February 28th.
Starting at 9pm, for those who are 18 and older, the show will be celebrating husband&wife’s new LP release Dark Dark Woods.
husband&wife has been touring since the beginning of February, where they have been stopping by various venues in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. They’re a quintessential indie-rock group, building slow melodies with steady basslines, and weaving song like threads with guitars. It’s intelligent pop rock.
While male and female vocal harmonies feel ethereal, and the addition of vibrations add bright colors to a shoegaze-influenced Glowfriends. The group echoes the influences of Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine while crafting a more youthful sound. Wash away the winter-time woes with layered dreampop.
Fiona Dickinson is part of the local Double Phelix collective, and her show will be an ethereal treat. Once she opens her set, the music will demand your undivided attention. Prepare to be haunted by her vocals, reminiscent of Bjork, as she blends shoegaze and old time folk with orchestral and choral arrangements. Her sound is lush, full, and symphonic when she includes backup musicians who might play reverberated slide guitar to the cello.
So please bring $5 for the touring artists. And do please come for these artists. You’ll take a lot from this experience.
The Kalamazoo Collective Arts Center is presenting a retrospective of local music through flyer art and live band photography. On display will be flyer work from the personal collections of some of Kalamazoo’s music world veterans as well as prints from some of our city’s up-and-coming photographers.
The reception begins tonight at 6PM and will run until around 11. There will be snacks and refreshments on hand as well as a pair of WIDR DJs on deck spinning records throughout the evening.
Swing on by and hang out for a while or just stop on by on your way to one of the shows going on elsewhere in the Vine Neighborhood. (Check the sidebar for details!)
It’s going down at 509 W. Vine st. and is totally free.
For more details, check out the facebook event here.
Valentines shows should be wildly inappropriate and off theme from mainstream heart-throb media–not enough ferocious growling and volcano guitars beating eardrums until they burst, so by golly that is just what is going on this coming weekend.
Starting this Thursday, possibly in honor of St. Valentine’s Day or maybe just because Thursday is the new Friday, the irreverent folks from Milhouse and Touchdown City set-up a three day music festival for those that don’t feel struck enough by love.
Tim Tapper has had words with critics before, but he has words for the faint of heart as well, and will play upon those cardio-strings with a ambling echoey mentality that escapes the trends of the other bands this weekend. He opens up the festival Thursday, 9 p.m., at Touchdown City.
Following him comes one-man guitar drone beamed straight out of a cassette tape Sean Hartman (of Forget the Times fame/ilk). Velvet Talk Motel, Trinket, and Abortion Survivors will also be playing Thursday.
But hey, in case an adrenaline shot wasn’t enough, a good-old boot-stomping from The Reptillian, Atalanta (Chicago), Sin Orden, and Greenwashed Friday night in the depths of the murky basement that is Milhouse. Bring your extra sweat lozenges. Atalanta jams hard while grating some garage screams, The Reptillian does its punk flambé of their electrics, and Sin Orden will fill in the gaps. Haven’t heard of Greenwashed, but surprises are a treat. Same time, 9 p.m.
Saturday? Oh yes, one more day in case everyone’s limbs aren’t broken and a thousand toothy grins haven’t been hockey-player ruined by this point. Statia does this:
–which is somewhere in between what a rock-opera and a scream-band would sound like, with Fisherking dialing it down to more of droney, speedy, epic battle of guitars and mountain-top yelps. That probably isn’t dialed down, but if you still have hearing by this point, then it should be. Seventeen Again rounds out the night. Same time as the other nights, back at Touchdown City.
Have fun, respect the house, respect each other (don’t actually break anyone’s bones), and maybe send some donations around. I’m sure someone will give you a hug.
Shoot ditkalamazoo@gmail.com for location information.
A long-standing tradition resides in the Vine Neighborhood. Those who frequent the house show scene may be familiar. The Fireplace Club (an infrequently used though highly-revered house venue space) has hosted a Valentine’s Day Love Song Open Mic for 4 years. This event invites anyone in the community to share songs about love (the positive or negative aspects thereof), either originals or covers, with their friends in a warm, comfortable living room/dining room environment.
This lovely fellow could be you!
This event is great for the single, the coupled, and the anywhere-in-between. This event is a great way to see local artists and friends perform songs they probably otherwise would not get an opportunity to – and perhaps even get people who rarely perform up to the challenge!
Stop by 926 Davis st. tonight at 6pm and learn linocut techniques and print valentines, patches, and postcards.
For those unaware, linocut is a printmaking technique similar to woodcut in which a design is cut into a sheet or block or linoleum. It is then inked and impressed onto paper or fabric.
*Materials will be provided but if you have some ink, wood, linoleum, or tools bring them! also, if theres specific fabric you’d like to print on bring that too!
As with all Kalamazoo Free School events, the workshop is open to people of all interest levels and abilities.
DITKalamazoo 