Author Archives: dangergroove

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About dangergroove

Andy is an up-and-coming author from Kalamazoo, Michigan who often writes plays, poems, essays, literary criticisms, fiction, and the occasional love letters to Martha Washington. He implores you to visit his blog and gaze at some of his writings, and bask in the home brewed mediocrity of it all. Also, if you are an eccentric rich person, please feel free to send him a "grant" in the form of unmarked hundred-dollar bills.

THURSDAY 11/29: Oreo Jones & DJ Action Jackson with DMA, Finaocardi, Beniam, Heart-Attack Zack, Deniro Swiper, and Kid Dew @ THE BLACK LODGE

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Thursday night The Black Lodge will host several hip-hop acts from around Kalamazoo and abroad.

Oreo Jones and DJ Action Jackson are from Indianapolis, currently on their Behind the Lips tour. Oreo is a rapper of the absurdist tradition, evoking comparisons to other playful hip-hop outfits like Das Racist or Odd Future, with the same good-times-party bent of Digital Underground. Think a block party co-hosted by Dave Chapelle and Tim & Eric.

Finaocardi is a local MC whose party-ready tunes serve as a smokescreen to a dynamic lyricist with bombastic delivery and a fantastic lyrical bent. His body of work trojan horses pertinent social themes with songs about chillin’ at home and getting down.

Beniam is an up-and-coming rapper in the Kalamazoo area who explores unique territory other rappers don’t necessarily delve into. He talks about highly spiritual and personal topics, and touches on issues that will satisfy your cerebral cravings.

Heart-Attack Zack melds together a sense of whimsical humor and personal introspection. A Drake or Kid Cudi who is perhaps less self-serious and more apt to rap as much about life’s absurdities and it’s struggles.

Deniro Swiper  is a vicious female MC who takes the traditional aggressive machismo of Hip-Hop music and turns it on its head, essentially taking the bullhorn and demolishing all misogynistic haters.

Kid Dew and his brother Why J will be coming down from Grand Rapids to present their street level rhymes and beats.

Please bring donations to support the touring MCs and DJs. Show starts at 9 o’ clock. Respect the house (and respect Black Fabio).

TONIGHT: I’m William Cutting, Neqriem, and Lacerations @ THE BLACK LODGE

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Tonight The Black Lodge will be celebrating Black Friday right with a trio of metal bands the local Michigan area.

I’m William Cutting, soulful metal troubadours from South Haven.

Lacerations, Progressive Metal from Battle Creek.

Neqriem, Death Metal from Kalamazoo.

Show starts at 8 o’ clock. Donations for out-of-towners are suggested.

TONIGHT: Mehrunes Dagon, Bert, Statia, and Entropy Elephant @ THE BLACK LODGE

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Tonight The Black Lodge will host a docket of acts poised to scratch all kinds of experimental musical itches.

Coming through from parts outside the Kalamazoo sphere are two metal bands that are completely unafraid to dive headfirst into strange sonic territories.

BerT are from Lansing, weaving together the slow, rolling thunder of doom metal with experimental electronics to produce a highly unique sound that pricks the eardrums on several fronts. Using their metal instrumentation as a baseline, they build on it with noise music techniques to produce a peculiar yet highly entertaining hybrid beast that implements the best of both genres.

Mehrunes Dagon are a doom metal band from Grand Rapids who execute the traditional tidal sounds indicative of the genre. Listening to their music is similar to watching a combustion engine being built piece-by-piece, building their rolling guitars to exciting heights and crescendos.

They will be getting local support from Kalamazoo experimentalists Statia and ENTROPY ELEPHANT.

Statia has recently been making the rounds in the Vine Neighborhood, with a crunchy metal sound that borrows as much from contemporary metal as it does 70’s prog rock.

ENTROPY ELEPHANT is a new side project from local musical mad scientist Sid Redlin. Thrown together on the fly for a fill-in gig at Louie’s several weeks ago, Sid quickly realized that he had created a monster which he will be gleefully unleashing on The Black Lodge.

Show starts at 9PM. Please bring donations for the out-of-town bands!

TONIGHT: Jerry Fels and the Jerry Fels w/ Boy Becomes Hero, Nick DeMott, and Neil Shah @ THE BLACK LODGE

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Tonight The Black Lodge will be hosting an acoustic night featuring Jerry Fels and the Jerry Fels, who is actually just one man. Currently on tour to celebrate his 2011 release “Evil is the Root of All Money,” Jerry is a solo acoustic performer whose music has both a poignant introspection and a wonderful sense of humor. With such songs as “Bad Bad Bad Bad Money” and “Girl You Make Me Want to Change My Number,” Jerry’s tongue is planted firmly in his cheek.

Supporting him are several local performers including Boy Becomes Hero, folk songs with a distinctly personal bent.

Nick DeMott, who veers through various topics with a whimsical appreciation for the American roots folk/ blues sound.

Rounding it out will be Neil Shah, best known for his involvement with several popular Kalamazoo bands like Ackley Kid, Witch Fingers, and Statia.

Show starts at 9PM. Please bring donations for the traveling troubadour.

TONIGHT: HIP-HOP NITE @ THE BLACK LODGE

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Tonight the Vine Neighborhood will be filled with dope rhymes and phat beats, courtesy of The Black Lodge. The all-star roster includes such local talents as:

Sista Mista, who will be opening with a special remix set. Come early to check out the preposterous reinterpretations of your favorite tracks.

Ms Chyna D will be coming through bringing her soulful blend of hip-hop virtuosity with some R&B mixed in for good measure. Think Lauryn Hill or early Queen Latifah.

Matt Black, former hometown hero now residing in Grand Rapids, will be swinging through fresh off of his triumphant opening performance for Del the Funky Homosapien. Rumor has it he may even bring a very Friendly MC with him to rock the basement.

Shneal is a local MC who has a foot grounded in two respective hemispheres, delivering both highly entertaining personal narratives and political aware manifestos. If Immortal Technique and Kid Cudi created a Funkenstein, Shneal would be the result.

Drama AKA Treason, perhaps best known for proliferating quality hip-hop music across the airwaves of WIDR, will be showcasing his own stellar Hip-Hop talents for the patrons of The Lodge. His music combines the political awareness of a Chuck D with a decidedly homegrown tint, speaking to both geopolitics and neighborhood injustice in the same breath.

Sista Mista will be hosting the evening, and the show starts at 9 o’ clock. Guests are highly encouraged to bring financial support for the artists via their merchandise. Respect the house with no defect, and come check out some of the best Hip-Hop Kalamazoo has to offer.

(Young Ghost will be unable to perform tonight due to a scheduling conflict).

Halloween Weekend Show

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You have a lot of options for your Halloween weekend. I know. But there’s this little show going on at Shakespeare’s. It’s a hip-hop show. With rappers like…

Matt Black and MC Friendly. Many Kalamazoo music fans should recognize Matt Black as one of our former hometown heroes, and he’s coming back down from Grand Rapids with the talent and skills that have historically paid the bills. The years since his move have been nothing but kind, and the craftsmanship he brought to his unparalleled production and intellectually stimulating lyrics have aged like fine wine since the too-rare-to-die era. MC Friendly is a like minded spirit, and their collaboration is the local hip-hop equivalent to when peanut butter and chocolate slammed together to make those Reese’s Cups.

Nunca Duerma is a DJ from Chicago who will be repping with Grandoise. Nunca is one of those rare DJs who can combine a modern electronic sensibility with beats that are distinctly within the echelon of hip-hop. He has the ability to craft catchy backing tracks that taste somewhat like British Electro-Hop while maintaining percussion that borrows more traditionally from an early 90’s west coast palette. The combination is nothing less than delicious.

Dezert Eez are a local hip-hop trio whose talent was not at all unnoticed. Former WMU students, they are no strangers to sharing the stage with hip-hop legends, opening for such icons as KRS-One, Slum Village, and Inspectah Deck. They combine a didactic lyrical delivery evocative of Mos Def with recognizable sampling techniques that utilize classic R&B.

Oh, there’s also this guy named Del the Funky Homosapien. You may have heard of him.

The show is tonight at 9 at Shakespeare’s Lower Level (the venue formerly known as The Globe). Tickets are $15 at the door, $10 in advance, but be forewarned that they are selling out like flapjacks at a lumberjack convention.

TONIGHT: ZOMBIE PROM @ THE BLACK LODGE

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Darkness falls across the land…

The midnight hour is close at hand…

Ah, do you remember your prom? A celebration of all your least favorite pop songs that were over-saturated by your local radio station, full of hormone driven misfits dancing around in a trance-zombie-like fashion.

At The Black Lodge, we like to tell it how it is. That’s why we’re putting together ZOMBIE PROM, a chance for you and your sweetie to relive the fun of dressing up with all the post-modern ironic zest of dressing up like zombies! Featuring music that is actually good without the high school dramatics, with a tiny dash of FUN FUN HORROR.

Inflatable Best Friend will be kicking things off with their fun, dance-ready punk rock. Coming on the heels of the release of their new album “DMT Bike Ride,” they should be full of surplus amounts of HAMMAGE.

Arson Party is a progressive metal band with members from both Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo. Best described as hardcore metal as written by a set of meticulous, obsessive-compulsive hands. Their melodically sung lyrics have been known to get stuck in the heads of innumerable Michigan metalheads.

That’s Blood are some local punk rockers with a heavy sound sprinkled with small fingerprints of 80’s California hardcore.

Abortion Survivors are another group of local punk rockers who shred and shred and then, even though one would think t’would be enough of said shredding, decide to shred for additional amounts of time. Speed, pep, and go, that should indeed make the body flow.

Cavalcade are a band from Lansing that perhaps is the closest to sounding directly like some sort of Satanic spell that could summon a veritable zombie apocalypse. Their sound is an evil hybrid beast, with vocals skewing towards what one might find a black metal record with instrumentation that finds an inexplicable place between doom and surf punk.

Show starts at 9. Get in the spirit and come as a zombie with your sweetheart! Or alone in some sort of Halloween costume! You could potentially come by yourself as yourself, but that shows a definitive lack of the ghoulish Halloween spirit.

For any additional information, visit the Facebook event page or Facebook page for The Black Lodge.

8/25 R. MUTT AND FITZGIG HENSON, EVERYONE AND THEIR EMPTY CUPS, INFLATABLE BEST FRIEND (BLACK LODGE 1st SHOW)

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This weekend, a new house venue sprung from the madcap cultural excavators who brought you such beloved house venues as Village Castle and The Band Cave will be having their inaugural show down where the rivers run deep, the trees grow like weeds, and the coffee and cigarettes flow in prodigious cadence.

The Black Lodge, a place which may or may not exist only in Agent Cooper’s mind (a matter of large and varied debate), will be holding a birthday celebration for one of Kalamazoo’s most eccentric of sonic treasures, Sid Redlin, the musical genius behind such projects as Boron Nuzzle, Sista Mista, Sneak Attack, and innumerable side projects, collaborations, and art installations of varying points of eccentricity.

Starting the night will be R. Mutt and Fitzgig Henson, an experimental three piece assembled by Sid Redlin himself. R. Mutt combines the sonic experimentation of Redlin’s noise music with a bottom-line danceablility (for those comfortable dancing to very peculiar music, that is). They do not form up very often, and their sparse appearances always leave their audiences in a state of bewilderment and profound gratitude to the universe for having witnesses such a unique and awesome performance.

Afterwards Everyone & Their Empty Cups are going to stop by. If you haven’t heard them before, Everyone & Their Empty Cups are the punk rock band that generic punk rock bands in coming-of-age movies about young college students wish they could be. They infect basements with terminal cases of fun that serve as a perfect soundtrack for your own personal life narrative (which, given the flexibility of their particular sound, could very well be anything from a lighthearted tale about finally asking out that girl you like or a dark, Fincheresque descent into your drug and alcohol addiction).

Closing out the festivities are Inflatable Best Friend. The fellows at IBF are well known for their catchy garage punk, and have been quite ubiquitous in the Kalamazoo music scene for the better part of the year. If you haven’t seen them yet, which seems an absurd proposition at this point, this would be a great opportunity to not only see the band play but catch the drummer as he exists in his natural habitat. If you come extra early, you may even catch him doing household chores or playing Ocarina of Time!

The show is Sartreday the Twenty-FiF, starting roundabouts 10 o’ clock in the PM. Contact the host for the address, or one of the admins over at The Black Lodge facebook page.

The owls are not what they seem…

7/20 BATFEST 2012: Joshualien, Sista Mista, Arson Party, WEARWOLF, Inflatable Best Friend, The Doctor’s Wives

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Some of Kalamazoo’s most loved musical madmen are breaking out of Arkham to celebrate a most esteemed day, summarily better than Christmas, the 4th of July, and Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day combined. For we celebrate Batmanakkah, a very rare and unique holiday that commemorates the release of a Christopher Nolan directed Batman film (of which, there is sadly only ONE LEFT).

So after you’ve heard Christian Bale gargle gravel for the very last time, dressed in the nines in some elaborate Mr. Freeze costume you’ve spent months putting together, mosey on down to the Band Cave to celebrate with your fellow  Batfans the way only us Kalamazoo kids can.

Joshualien will be kicking things off with his delicious noisy blend of dance-able electronic jams. Seeing Josh kick his stuff is much like being abducted by aliens and taken to one of their space raves, and hits the rare sweet spot of being accessible enough for the rave kids yet out-there enough to get the avant-guardians to put a smile on that face.

Sista Mista will be there. They will rap about movies and socio-economic problems, and probably make complete fools of themselves because they are just that damned excited about Batman. If you haven’t heard them, combine Public Enemy, Doctor Who, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch into some kind of absurd gumbo and chase it with Newport cigarettes.

Arson Party are a team of musical professionals who are sick and tired of crappy redundant metal, and bring a deft and meticulous touch to their headband inducing tunes that conjure up the melodic catchiness of 80’s hair while keeping their bite and brutality intact.

Inflatable Best Friend are a bunch of talented hooligans who spread like fear toxin through the Narrows of the student ghetto, except instead of making everyone terrified and determined to kill Batman, they spread their infectious garage punk sounds into the ears of the young people to induce a torrential stream of one-two steps and an inescapable and terminal case of fun.

The Doctor’s Wives are an all girl punk-rock trio from Grand Rapids who play irresistibly catchy punk-pop in an early 90’s California sort of vein. They’re going to be opening for the excellent Shonen Knife later this month at the Pyramid Scheme, but first they’ll be coming down to Kalamazoo to fight off the superstitious and cowardly criminals in our midst.

Finally, WEARWOLF will give Batfest the music it deserves, making sure the Band Cave is reduced to a sweaty basement full of melted Joker makeup after he brings his electronic-dance cuts to the floor.

It’s a Batman themed show, and folks are absolutely encouraged to dress up in ridiculous Bat-related costumes. Just be creative (EVERYONE CAN’T DRESS UP AS CRAZY QUILT, OKAY?) If you come in something particularly stupendous you might even get something (!) Bring some money for the out-of-town band. Show starts at 7. DO IT.

If you’re wondering just where the Band Cave is at, contact the event host (BATFEST 2012 FACEBOOK PAGE).

P.S.: This is gonna be the last blast at the Band Cave before those hooligans move back to the warm cocoon of the student ghetto. As such, we’ll be organizing a car pool from Fourth Coast at 7:00PM for those who either cannot or wish not to drive to make it real special. If you’re interested, contact the host, or just show up there at 7 if you’re a spur of the moment sort of person.