Shuffle No. 13

sh uffle

Bronzed Chorus + Cement Stars + wyla + mutant league + tom maxwell + systems

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Carolinas’ Independent Music Source

shufflemag.com Issue #13 Fall 2011

≠ Brain F Likes It

‘Rough’

Blake Deming

8-Tracks Out of Obscurity

Shirlette Ammons

New Dynamite Collaborations

Must-Sees at Hopscotch, Moogfest and Shakori Hills

05 Concert calendar 06 Bronzed Chorus 08 Cement Stars 11 wyla 12 mutant league 13 tom maxwell 14 systems 16 blake deming 24 Shirlette & The Dynamite Brothers 29 Now Hear This: Megafaun 30 editors’ picks 33 Q&A: Moogfest’s Ashley Capps 34 The Insider: Drawing Up Hopscotch 36 F estivals’ Must-See Bands

Brain F ≠ page 20

Issue #13 Publisher Brian Cullinan EDITORIAL Editor In Chief John Schacht Assistant Editor Jordan Lawrence Contributing Editor Bryan C. Reed Design Gurus Taylor Smith Patrick Willett Photo Editor Enid Valu Illustrator Taylor Williams Website Bryan C. Reed

Contributing Writers Grayson Currin Corbie Hill Brian Howe Topher Manilla Chris Parker Ryan Snyder Contributing Photographers Allie Mullin Daniel Coston Contributing Inspirations Louie, Goatfeathers menu, Geography of Nowhere, FC Barcelona, Stephen Colbert, Beer Sales/Market Reps.

James Wallace: Columbia Bryan Dowling: Charlotte, Asheville Christie Coyle: Triad Brett Nash: Charleston Phil Venable: Triangle Kelly Sweitzer: Wilmington

Josh Robbins: Special Projects/Events Microphone image used for logo on page 34 courtesy of Vectorportal.com Shuffle Magazine Attn: Music Submissions P.O. Box 1777 Charlotte, N.C. 28224 -1777 Main Phone: 704.837.2024 Cover photo: Allie Mullin This page: Allie Mullin

Copyright Shuffle Magazine, 2011. All content property of Shuffle Magazine, LLC. No reproductions or reuse of this material is authorized without the written consent of Shuffle Magazine.

Shuffle magazine is not responsible for your music tastes, just our own.

Recess Fest #3, Day 3 — Joan of Arc at Milestone

Concert Calendar september

7 Wooden Wand @ Nightlight 8-10 Hopscotch in Raleigh (various venues)

8 Earth with Mount Eerie @ Grey Eagle

8 Pipe with Chest Pains @ Nightlight

9 Xiu Xiu with Kindest Lines @ Grey Eagle

9 The Pullman Strike CD release party @ Tremont Music Hall 10 Swans with Sir Richard Bishop @ Orange Peel 10 The Foreign Exchange @ Neighborhood Theatre 11 Swans with Sir Richard Bishop @ Tremont Music Hall 12 TV On The Radio with Broken Social Scene @ The Fillmore Charlotte 12 Titus Andronicus @ The Barn at Wake Forest University 12 Beach Fossils with Yardwork @ Visulite Theatre 13 Okkervil River with Wye Oak @ Lincoln Theatre 14 Despise You with Magrudergrind @ Kings Barcade 15 Girls @ Orange Peel 16 Black Moth Super Rainbow with Dosh and Marshmallow Ghosts @ Grey Eagle 17 Rock The Bells Tour with Raekwon and Ghostface Killah (performing Only Built 4 Cuban Linx) and Mobb Deep (performing The Infamous) @ The Fillmore Charlotte 17 Steve Earle @ DPAC 17 Girls @ Cat’s Cradle 17 Neon Indian @ Local 506 17 Fruit Bats with Vetiver @ Motorco Music Hall 18 Wolves In The Throne Room with Mount Eerie @ Legitimate Business 18 The Low Anthem @ Local 506 19 The Low Anthem @ Visulite Theatre 20 Meat Puppets with the Weeks @ Cat’s Cradle 21 Meat Puppets @ Visulite Theatre 21 Fleet Foxes with The Walkmen @ Raleigh Amphitheatre 21 Wild Beasts @ Cat’s Cradle 21 Blondie @ DPAC 21 Nick 13 @ Local 506 22 Elvis Costello & The Imposters @ DPAC

Photo by Daniel Coston

22 Megafaun @ Cat’s Cradle 22 Meat Puppets with the Weeks @ Grey Eagle 24 Ty Segall with Mikal Cronin @ Duke Coffeehouse 24 WHY? @ Carrboro ArtsCenter 24 Olivia Tremor Control @ Casbah 24 Mandolin Orange record release party @ Cat’s Cradle 25 Frank Turner @ New Brookland Tavern 26 Cut Copy, Washed Out, Midnight Magic @ Orange Peel 26 Cymbals Eat Guitars @ Local 506 27 Wilco with Nick Lowe @ Raleigh Amphitheatre 27 Cut Copy with Washed Out @ Cat’s Cradle 28 They Might Be Giants @ Orange Peel 29 Opeth @ Amos’ Southend 30 Explosions in the Sky with Wye Oak @ Orange Peel

october

1 Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks @ Haw River Ballroom 2 The Lemonheads (performing It’s A Shame About Ray) @ Cat’s Cradle 3 Tapes ‘N Tapes @ Cat’s Cradle 4 Das Racist @ Lincoln Theatre 4 Fleet Foxes @ Thomas Wolfe Auditorium 4 The Lemonheads @ Neighborhood Theatre 5 Bonnie “Prince” Billy @ Marshall High Studios 5 tUnE-yArDs @ Cat’s Cradle 6 Tyler Ramsey CD release party @ Grey Eagle 7-8 Benji Hughes @ Snug Harbor 8 Adele @ DPAC 9 Weird Al Yankovic @ DPAC 10 Junior Boys @ Cat’s Cradle 11 The War On Drugs @ Kings Barcade 12 The War On Drugs with Purling Hiss and Carter Tanton @ Grey Eagle 14 mc chris @ New Brookland Tavern 15 Toro Y Moi with Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Bass Drum of Death @ New Brookland Tavern 15 Weedeater @ Tremont Music Hall

16 Aretha Franklin @ DPAC 16 mc chris @ Cat’s Cradle 18 GWAR @ Amos’ Southend 20 Willie Nelson @ DPAC 21 Wild Flag @ Cat’s Cradle 21 NOFX with The Bouncing Souls @ The Fillmore Charlotte 22 If You Wannas with Joshua Carpenter Band @ Grey Eagle 22 Dawes with Blitzen Trapper @ Cat’s Cradle 23 Loretta Lynn @ DPAC 23 Reverend Horton Heat @ Music Farm 24 Zola Jesus @ Local 506 25 The Jayhawks with Tift Merritt @ Orange Peel 26 Ted Leo + The Pharmacists with Pujol @ Kings Barcade 26 The Jayhawks @ Carolina Theatre 27 OFWGKTA @ Cat’s Cradle 27 Ted Leo + The Pharmacists with Pujol @ New Brookland Tavern 27 Portugal. The Man with Alberta Cross @ Neighborhood Theatre 28-30 Moogfest in Asheville (various venues) 29 M83 @ Kings Barcade 29 Reverend Horton Heat with Supersuckers, Dan Sartain @ Cat’s Cradle 29 The Flaming Lips @ Asheville Civic Center 30 Boris with Asobi Seksu @ Cat’s Cradle

november

2 Reverend Horton Heat with Supersuckers, Dan Sartain @ Orange Peel 9 Cloud Nothings @ Local 506 10 Ted Leo + The Pharmacists with Pujol @ Grey Eagle 11 The Sea and Cake @ Local 506 12 Wooden Shjips with Birds of Avalon @ Kings Barcade 13 Exhumed @ Tremont Music Hall 16 Method Man with Curren$y and Big K.R.I.T. @ Amos’ Southend 18 The Slackers @ Visulite Theatre 19 Lykke Li with First Aid Kit @ Orange Peel 10 Mayhem @ Tremont Music Hall 16 Gallagher @ Neighborhood Theatre

Concert Calendar shufflemag.com 5

The Bronzed Chorus New Sounds, New Inspiration

By Ryan Snyder

I

n the Biblical sense, the practice of gleaning was one of the first forms of social welfare. Farmers left a small portion of a crop as an offering for the poor, the orphaned or simply the foreign. Give, and it will be given to you, as St. Luke, patron of the artist, wrote.

But the giving part is what gets harder as time goes on, says Greensboro-based Bronzed Chorus guitarist Adam Joyce. That idea inspired the title of the band’s latest EP, Gleaning (Hello Sir), a four-track offering released in July that’s the instrumental rock duo’s boldest and best effort yet. Getting to the next full-length record, however, is the tricky part.

“We need a lot of things, really, to just keep going as a band. We need another vehicle. We need to upgrade some equipment,” Joyce says.

So The Bronzed Chorus, the duo of Joyce and new drummer Hunter Allen, has put together a Kickstarter campaign in hopes of getting right logistically, not only for themselves, but for dance-electronic band Casual Curious (for whom Allen drums) and Joyce’s start-up label, Bit Heart Records. But as Joyce would suggest, nothing comes easily, and that includes the EP’s blissed-out sounds, which may surprise fans of their bedroom

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debut thurtythurty and the more polished follow-up I Am the Spring.

Co-founder Brennan O’Brien departed shortly after the release of I Am the Spring in 2009. Allen had already been performing with the band in a dual-drum arrangement and was ready to pull double duty on drums and keys. But Joyce, never content to settle or be derivative artistically, felt the band was still slipping into a creative impasse. The thought that there are only so many sounds two people can make, no matter how many toys find their way onto a pedal board, crept into his thinking. The band flirted with a traditional four-piece rock arrangement for a single show, but the idea was quickly scuttled.

“It just didn’t make sense,” Joyce says.

“Everyone wanted to play guitar, no one would pick up a bass.”

Just keep pushing yourself, he was told.

The Bronzed Chorus has always been two people making the sound of many. He agreed with the sentiment. Enter Gleaning, the title of which Joyce says refers to simply not having anything left to give, but still giving more. The band found the un-harvested field they sought for these songs through an Atari 2600 modified into a

synthcart, and their labyrinthine switches and pedals became even more esoteric. The new gear is featured prominently on the EP, which was recorded almost entirely live. But Allen said the band’s next full-length may take a fundamentally different approach from past albums given the band’s new formula.

“I used to be totally against overdubbing, but I’m a little more open to it now. It just feels better,” he said. “It was because of pride—‘Oh, I’m playing on this stuff.’ Then you do everything in one take and think, ‘Well that’s stupid. I just want it to sound good.’ ” The band describes Gleaning as an EP of its travels and influences. Without a single spoken word set against Joyce’s shimmering, heavily gained guitar licks or Allen’s uncompromising bursts of floor tom and bright synth, they construct powerfully emotive instrumentals that are likely to inspire a wide range of emotional responses.

But The Bronzed Chorus gained more than a great EP from their effort. Having thrown themselves at new sounds, they glean fresh inspiration and a newfound openness to doing things differently. They gave, and now they’re getting back the spark they needed to continue. Looks like St. Luke had it right. shuf13

Photo by Mike White

Cement Stars Growing Up Right

By John Schacht

T

he Casbah stage at Tremont Music Hall is cast in dark hues. Floor lights throw indigo and blood-red shades over the five members of Charlotte’s Cement Stars. Reverb from two guitars glazes the band’s insistent, pulsing beat, while the singers’ vocals float on top like sea foam. The scene looks and sounds like a vintage late80s/early-90s video, a 120 Minutes flashback of middle-era Cure or Slowdive projected across the time-divide.

“We’re all early-80s babies,” says singer/ songwriter Bryan OIson, 26, who along with his drummer brother Shaun, 28, grew up in the Chicago suburbs listening to their parents’ New Wave and post-punk records.

“All those bands, they had an influence on us, subconsciously at least, because we grew up with them. It comes out in our music, but it’s never really intentional.”

Bryan—who’s also Cement Stars second guitarist—says the draw was the simplicity beneath those bands’ rich textures. The quintet’s glistening new six-song EP, Form/ Temper, takes those familiar elements and refracts them into a fresh vision. On “Passable Ghosts,” a bee-buzz synth drones over a metronomic beat while one guitar shoulders the melody and another colors it in with dense distortion; over the toms-and-bass-

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drum rumble of “Holograms,” Enid Valu’s gossamer voice shadows Bryan’s collagelike lyrics, the Rachel Goswell to his Neil Halstead; and on “Fractals” and “Ivy,” the EP’s two most exciting cuts, the tension waxes and wanes until an onslaught of distorted guitar waves turns simple pop into something epic.

When the brothers first formed Cement Stars, the music’s simplistic foundation dovetailed with Bryan’s music-newbie status.

The younger Olson only picked up guitar in 2006 at his brother’s behest, but he showed an immediate knack for songwriting. So much so that Shaun put aside his desire to play guitar rather than drums because his brother showed so much frontman promise. (Shaun scratches his guitar itch as Miami Dice, a DJwith-axe, Italo Disco-flavored project.)

“I’m not a guitar virtuoso at all, I just like writing songs and I like melody,” Bryan says.

“Shaun also saw that I was really passionate about it.”

The band’s 2009 debut, the full-length Geometrics, was primarily a brothers’ act, since Shaun and Bryan saw Cement Stars then as a lo-fi bedroom recording project.

The band’s influences are more discernible here, mostly in the pulsing New Order guitar riffs, 80s synths and Depeche Modesongbook processed beats. But there are

intriguing combinations at work even here, including some echoes of trip-hop, courtesy of the eponymous Portishead record their mother owned.

“We realized then the potential music had,” Bryan says of his 7th grade self. “It was a gateway drug, a gateway band to a lot of other experimental bands.”

In June 2009, the band added Cody Hare (a.k.a. DJ Buckmaster) to play synthesizer and auxiliary percussion. Though he left the band in March of this year, Hare’s roles remained part of Cement Stars’ live show. They were picked up by Valu (Shuffle’s photo editor), who officially joined—along with bassist Kurt Dodrill—shortly afterward. But the band really came into its Form/Temper sound with the addition of guitarist Joshua Faggart, whose metal-honed technical chops expanded Cement Stars’ sonic palette.

“He’s the kind of guitarist that can play anything,” Bryan says. “It brought a different sound and diversity to our music, and around that time is when our sound evolved.”

That evolution has already earned them a record deal with local imprint Electric Mountain, as well as opening slots for Future Islands, Toro Y Moi and Twin Sisters. And tonight, on the Casbah’s stage, it’s easy to believe this is only Cement Stars’ early days. shuf13

Photos by Enid Valu; Collage by Bryan Olson

Wyla Cosmic Ironic Beauty

By Topher Manilla

C

onversations with Edward Madill seem to get metaphysical real quick.

One moment, the 20-year-old UNCAsheville student behind psych-gaze oddity Wyla is talking about an inspirational trip to Asheville’s Moog headquarters when he was in high school. The next, he’s waxing poetic on the belief he shares with the late Robert Moog that the human mind and computers can — and will — weave together in a cosmic communion.

“My dad took me for my birthday, and it was about a year after Moog died,” Madill remembers. “Everyone there has a sort of spiritual way of believing the human mind can fuse with electronic things. It’s really kind of beautiful.”

And when we discuss the little nuggets of late-90s, indie rock irony folded into his music, Madill — an incredibly jovial young man — goes down a similar path.

“I do think there’s something really beautiful, almost spiritual, about irony,” he says, “that ability to double-think yourself.

Really.”

To date, Wyla is not much more than Madill collaborating with friends and self-recording a constant stream of digital albums and EPs.

Photo by Morgan Duncan

The first songs were written and posted to Bandcamp at the start of Madill’s college freshman year.

“I didn’t even own an amp for that first Bandcamp EP,” Madill says. “It’s about being someplace on your own for the first time, falling in love.”

A Wyla standout, “Nebuchadnezzar,” with its blown-out boogie, is a tribute to a hut in the woods near campus where Madill and friends go to hang out every day.

In a city rich with guitar noodlers purporting to be psychedelic, Madill’s crunchy, slow-burn drug-rock is nice counter-programming for the true psych scene.

In the last few months, the Bandcamp jams have drawn attention from bedrock tastemaker blogs like Altered Zones, who noted “Madill’s engaging, cavernous baritone floating a few meters above the swirling noir grooves,” and likened Wyla to Marmoset, Swell Maps and Syd Barrett.

Pretty decent company, and one that might also include the ragged cosmic-smack blues of Spaceman 3. The blogs, Madill says, have drawn the attention of a few labels. One senses that Madill’s music would be a fine fit

on the roster of a young label like Woodsist or Underwater Peoples.

His latest long-player, Dulcet, was posted to Bandcamp in June. It’s a healthy step forward. “Hazlo Girar” is a smiling nod toward the chillwave of Washed Out, and as good a send-up of the sub-genre as I’ve heard in a while. And my favorite tune, “Take Your Time,” intricately weaves two lovely guitar parts — one an open, Neil Young-esque strum; the other a chugging, Pavement riff.

All the while, chiming synths fall in and out of the fog. It’s some elevated songwriting that Madill just shrugs off in that sort of mountainsurfer way that Asheville folk sometimes have.

“I was in jazz band forever,” Madill says.

“My teacher was pretty chill. He didn’t make me learn music, just chord structures.”

Madill is trying to figure out a steady band for Wyla. He’s losing his bassist to the Marine Corps (where he’ll play stand-up bass in its band), and the current drummer is an out-oftowner. Madill is ready to get deeper into the scene as a live act, too.

As he puts it, “Asheville is really exploding right now.”. shuf13

shufflemag.com 11

mutant league Why So Serious?

By Jordan Lawrence

M

utant League is playing Slim’s Downtown Distillery in Raleigh, and it’s Shark Week. If anyone wasn’t aware of the Discovery Channel carnage, they certainly were by the end of the set.

“Shark Week!” bassist Joey Doak exclaims after every song, tying his band’s sound to the inexplicably popular TV phenomenon in a way that felt ironic, but really wasn’t. Towards the end of the show, many in the audience were anticipating the outburst and shouting happily along with him. Others cringed and shook their heads.

The way Mutant League carries itself can be polarizing. The band dives into slacker rock with equal relish for the genre’s strungout guitar architecture and the fuck-all attitude with which its 90s progenitors played it. The bands they’re often compared to, namely Pavement and Dinosaur, Jr, started as irreverent indie rockers, but are now seen as serious musicians. That must be taken seriously. Mutant League approaches tones and riffs purposefully, but lives for the tomfoolery its members see as intrinsic to rock & roll.

“We have kind of a rep for being slacker party boys,” Doak says between sips of Miller High Life on the bar’s dimly lit patio. “We

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recorded at (Greensboro venue) Legitimate Business and we play there all the time, and the guy who was recording us just jokingly said something like, ‘I’m surprised you guys don’t have beers in your hands,’ because every time we play, we all have a couple beers lined up beside us. I mean, most bands do that. I think people see that we’re having a good time with it.”

Mutant League formed as a a quartet of Outer Banks high school buds, but didn’t get going in earnest until they relocated to Greensboro in 2008. After the move, life shuffled the deck. Their first drummer had a baby and had to bow out, and second guitarist Matt Northrup quit the band shortly after to focus on his solo recordings.

They re-formed as a trio with singer Tyler Byers taking on all guitar responsibilities and Patrick Sheehan coming on to play drums.

The music on Mutant League’s energetic and exiting debut EP Landmarks began as Byers’ bedroom recordings. Blowing up the meager textures and simple drum machines of those early demos, the band builds a catchy but deceptive four-song blast of party-rock enthusiasm that also meanders through ever-shifting tones that offer

cerebral satisfaction.

The record opens with “Aloha,” a wordless demonstration of the band’s instrumental powers. Byers says the song resulted from a bunch of great riffs he had that just wouldn’t fit anywhere else. Placed together, his different melodic ideas build seamlessly to an explosive crescendo, veering madly into livewire fills several times along the way. It’s a quick rock pick-me-up, but it also satisfies on an intellectual level by way of its complex arrangement and adventurous use of tone.

“The new stuff we’re writing is getting more intricate,” Byers says. “It’s definitely more serious music.”

Mutant League plans to head back into the studio soon, hoping to expand their palate on an eight or nine-song tape. They’re flush with new ideas and giddy about the different ways they can execute them. But, as Doak’s onstage antics demonstrate, this is still a band that lives for a good time.

They refuse to choose between the seriousness of their well-manicured tones and the frivolity of their snark. Like the sharks on the bar’s TVs, Mutant Leage isn’t afraid to bite off more than they can chew. So far, it’s all gone down just fine. shuf13

Photo by Ashley Weinberger

Tom Maxwell Through the Gauntlet

By Chris Parker

W

hile it’s certainly possible to create a great album without enduring extreme personal turmoil…it probably doesn’t hurt. That’s the lesson of Tom Maxwell, whose terrific new album, Kingdom Come, was inspired by emotional tumult worthy of the saddest country song heartache.

“I went through a 1-2-3 punch of my wife moving out and my son being diagnosed with leukemia eight days later,” the 45-year-old Maxwell says, also listing a song-publishing imbroglio that left him without that oncereliable source of income. “This all happened within a three-month period, along with having to put my cat down. I had to go back to the only other thing I knew how to do — the food service industry.”

But the former Squirrel Nut Zipper, who wrote their hit “Hell,” fortunately had more on his plate than misfortune and slinging hash. Maxwell was inspired after attending a benefit for local icon Snüzz (Bus Stop, Ben Folds) – who’s battling lymphoma – and returned to the studio to record his first solo release since 2000’s Samsara.

The happy part of the story – beyond the new album – is that after a three-and-a-half year battle, his eight-year-old son survived the ordeal. The challenge of the experience

Photo by Jil Christensen

prompted the album’s title, a term Maxwell remembers perplexing him as a child. “‘Kingdom come’ refers to heaven, basically. What happens after we live. This is the return of Christ, paradise on earth, but the way it’s used in our language is something terrible. It’s annihilation. And I felt like I had been annihilated,” he says, citing his son’s long hospital stay. “It almost crushed me in so many other ways, but it was so obviously what I needed to do. It was completely unambiguous.”

As a result, Kingdom Come is a sometimes biting, sometimes despairing, ultimately exultant album. Not that all of the 14 songs were written in the immediate aftermath.

Some, like “Never Going to Fall In Love Again,” go back to when he was 25, but felt appropriate for the album. The disc ranges from the self-destructive, circus-inflected cabaret “Why I Smoke” and dark, banjodriven jazz-blues of “So High,” to the pretty album-closing piano ballad, “All Things,” where Maxwell finally achieves resolution and a little peace.

But the best song may be the admittedly most self-indulgent one, “Fuck It.” Full of evocative weeping strings (arranged by Lost In the Trees’ Ari Picker) and fueled by hushed, hoarse vocals that suggest The

Final Cut-era Roger Waters, it’s a beautifully baroque two-minute ode to complete surrender.

“They sound like the salon band on the Titanic,” Maxwell jokes. “If you’re going to be expressing that kind of deeply self-indulgent sentiment, what better vehicle than complete baroque overstatement? Like, ‘I’m going to marinate in this.’”

But while “Fuck It” and the equally dispiriting — though still deeply affecting — post-Beatles Paul McCartney-style piano ballad “Party of One” may channel deep discontent, Maxwell’s happy to have made it through. And he’s ecstatic to be playing music again.

“We create and then live these emotional narratives. Like ‘I am a victim.’ And I certainly embraced that for a long time,” he says. “A friend told me, ‘You need to be lifted up and you lift other people up with you.’ I never thought of it like that, but that’s the idea.

The fame thing is what people think is the ultimate goal. But that always seemed a little too limited and adolescent. I want to communicate with people. I want to say or do something that’s resonant.” shuf13

shufflemag.com 13

Systems Home Is Where the Heavy Is

By Corbie Hill

H

ouses are packed in tight in this Carrboro neighborhood -- several are jammed together on a single acre bisected by a dirt drive. A high-volume math-metal band thrashes away in the single bedroom of one house until a cop knocks on the window. Guitarist Daniel McDonald, 28, steps outside. A neighbor McDonald says is schizophrenic watches from behind a skimpy tree that offers little concealment. From inside the house, bassist Spencer Lee, 23, incredulously asks if he’s the guy who called the cops. Lee walks to the window, smiles, and waves. The neighbor peers back around the sapling.

The four members of Systems don’t seem overly bothered or surprised. McDonald joked beforehand about the likelihood of a police appearance. In the band’s three years, it’s lost numerous practice spaces and metal-friendly venues. It’s not that Carrboro isn’t a music town, the members insist, but that it has a lousy support mechanism for heavy music.

These problems are endemic, Lee believes, to a sense of entitlement that pervades Carrboro and nearby Chapel Hill. “People are unwilling to compromise on their personal space here,” he explains. The same thing happened when the band practiced in a Hanna Street rental. “There was no

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[neighborly] dialogue,” Lee says. The family next door called the cops early one Friday evening, which killed it as a practice pad.

The band members describe a dichotomy at work in which patrons of the arts take a closedminded stance toward heavy or aggressive music. “People love to go into art museums and go ‘it’s very dark and shows the nasty underbelly of society,’” Lee says. “But once music is brought into it, they immediately shut off and want nothing to do with it.”

Systems threw shows at Hanna Street, chaotic affairs where McDonald cranked his full-stack and Cameron Zarrabzadeh, 23, broke his guitar neck on multiple occasions. While art and literature may portray violence or visceral energy, Systems presents it in person. Underage kids were welcome at the Hanna Street shows, too, and Zarrabzadeh laments an alcohol salessupported, 21-and-up venue culture that shuts out younger listeners. The guitarist/ vocalist is calm and measures his words carefully. He’s studied plant medicine with the Navajo and approaches serious topics with philosophical reverence.

“Teens should be involved, especially in music that’s cathartic and expresses internalized violence,” he says. “I know a lot of people, it’s saved their lives.”

Systems’ first LP – which has languished

in pre-release limbo since the spring –­i­ s named for a desert plant used by southwestern natives: Ghost Medicine. Eight anxiety-inducing tracks explore themes of death and loss. Drummer Peter Gwynne’s math-borne drumming and McDonald’s soaring post-rock guitar find common ground in Lee and Zarrabzadeh’s turbulent, seething metal. Opening track “Procession” is a dark, patient invocation: Explosions in the Sky gone nihilist. Rusty guitars growl behind chanted vocals in “Datura Hallowing” before a serpentine melody emerges. “The Burial” juxtaposes mosh-ready smart thrash a la Converge with Neurot-style post-metal.

With the band divided on how to release it, Ghost Medicine is currently homeless. It’s a familiar state. Systems may have lost several practice spaces, but McDonald has also been kicked out of several rentals that were bulldozed and turned to condos. “They’re knocking down the places we’re living” in, he says. And it may be that McDonald is sympathetic toward his neighbor because of the things they will soon have in common.

As the neighbor rants at the police and slinks back to his little red house, McDonald notes that it’s slated for demolition. When the man’s mother died, he lost the house. And he – like Systems – will soon be looking for another home. shuf13

Photo courtesy of Systems

Hidden in Plain Sight

Charlotte’s Blake Deming turns faded dreams of stardom into pop-collage Basement Tapes

By Bryan C. Reed

B

lake Deming is done chasing fame. Life is too good right now to bother with all that. At 41, Deming has a wife, a dog, two boys — ages 4 and 2 — and a garden. Once he struggled to make it as a songwriter in his native Seattle; today he’s content to raise his kids and the peppers, okra, tomatoes and zucchini growing in his Charlotte backyard.

The only evidence of his musical glory days lives online, at www.wigfarmstereotapes.com, where five albums of cut-and-paste pop run a stylistic gamut from funky dub to fuzz-fried countryrock, and have been standing on offer — as $1,000 8-tracks or free downloads — since the site went live in 2007.

“The whole thing was, obviously, supposed to be a farce,” he says, leaning across a wobbly table at Phat Burrito in Charlotte’s South End, fighting back a grin. “It just got left up there to sort of fester because I just didn’t care. And, so there you have it, man.

You’re stuck with trying to write an article about a guy who just doesn’t give a shit.”

He laughs when he says he doesn’t give a shit. He laughs because of the challenge he’s laid before me. But mostly he laughs because it isn’t true. There was a time when Deming gave quite a

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few shits.

When Deming arrives, he bounds through the restaurant’s door, lifts his large, white plastic sunglasses over his forehead and shoots quick glances across the room, looking for a journalist he’s never met. He orders a taco and a PBR, and sets about telling his story with a mix of self-deprecating humor and obvious nostalgia for the career he almost had.

Deming grew up in Seattle, where, as a teenager, he got into heavy metal and later punk rock. “Hüsker Dü came to town on my prom night, which was a fortunate way for me to avoid going to prom,” he recalls. His parents’ Bob Dylan records left the deepest impression, though. “Even today, when I listen to [Dylan’s] stuff; even when I see him and he’s sub-remarkable, he’s magic,” Deming says. Later, he’d discover Captain Beefheart and Funkadelic, which would prove to be pivotal influences, as well.

In high school, Deming was in and out of various punk bands, but nothing stuck. By the time he graduated, he’d had it with bands, anyway. “There’s always kind of a conflict with having a band,” he says. “I would rather be a painter or something. I can command the whole thing.”

As grunge was entering its infancy in Seattle, Deming packed

Photos of Blake Deming by Neil Brown

his bags for New York, determined to make it as a solo artist. “I wasn’t into that,” he says of the burgeoning grunge scene. “I liked ’em. I think a lot of ’em were really good, but I was like, ‘Well, this isn’t the place for me. I might as well cut out.’”

In New York, he struggled for gigs, but eventually found a niche in that city’s developing anti-folk scene. He shared gigs with Paleface, and benefited from his manager’s benevolence in landing gigs. “It was pretty amazing, because I spent two years trying to get gigs there, and I really didn’t have much to show for it,” Deming says. “But this manager would just kinda pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, I got this guy.

He’s fabulous. Book ’im.’”

Some labels showed interest, but nothing panned out. So as 90s approached their midpoint, Deming headed back to Seattle. Upon arrival, Deming realized just how deep the grunge-explosion’s crater really was. “When I came back, suddenly everybody had a record deal,” he says. “Everybody. And most of ’em ended up legally forbidden to even use their own names. I mean, they just slapped ‘em on the wall. It didn’t stick. They fell. They had a fiverecord deal and they ended up just selling it all. They can’t even use their names anymore.”

Deming was just glad to be able to offset his variety of “shit-ass” jobs — from working in the “toxic sludge” of silver reclamation to swapping housekeeping services for rent — with whatever gig he could land. He’d share the stage with Steve Earle one night, Ani DiFranco the next, whoever was coming through town, he says. He recorded some music and passed it out to friends and acquaintances. Some of the material from this era found its way onto Bakelite Warrior, the first of the five collections available at his farce of a website.

Still, despite some success, Deming was swimming upstream.

The grind of booking and promoting gigs was getting old. “The work that went into promoting them, and getting people to show up, it took so much time, there wasn’t any time to play anymore,” he says. “It just seemed like an impossibility. It was like, ‘Well, this shit’s passed me by. Didn’t get lucky — or at least didn’t get lucky enough.’”

Those shit-ass jobs weren’t cutting it either. “When I get my Social Security statements now, it says I made 500 bucks in ’95, another 500 in ’96.” Deming says. “I’m still proud of that. But it was no way to live. It couldn’t quite hang on, so I had to get a real job.”

His girlfriend (now his wife) was working at Muzak as a receptionist and helped Deming land a job as a shipping clerk.

When the company moved its headquarters from Seattle to Fort Mill, S.C., in 1999, the Demings moved with it. In his spare time, Deming kept tinkering with sounds and songs. Though he’s generally an analog purist (hence the 8-tracks), he found an interest in digital editing and production.

It was in these first years of the new millennium that Deming cultivated and compiled the sounds on his albums, a goulash of blues and funk, cut-and-paste sampledelica and grinning whimsy. 

shufflemag.com 17

Hidden in Plain Sight (cont’d) The tapes jump from fuzzy blues rock (Give Me Back My Bones) to noisy electronic prank-jams (Shhh); from reggae-inflected funk (Dartboard Sky) to scuzzblasted country rock (Urchin of Love).

“I ended up getting into digital editing and whatnot,” he says. Soon he found himself wondering, “‘How can I use this new type of shit to somehow piecemeal something together, and use it to my advantage somehow, and just keep making stuff?’”

“I would prefer to keep making stuff,” he says. “It makes me feel good.”

Given his background, and the eccentric and eclectic accoutrement Deming lays across what would be simple, hooky pop songs if left unadorned, it’s hard not to imagine Deming as a lost 120 Minutes segment, pulling together the best moments of Beck, Daniel Johnston, early Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers.

The tapes came about through collaboration with Neil Brown, a graphic artist whose work Deming admired. Brown built the Wigfarm Stereo Tapes website, took a series of photos, and designed the labels for Deming’s 8-tracks. “I just wanted someone to design me some 8-track covers, some 8-track stickers so I could make my own 8-tracks,” Deming says. “I can’t afford to press my records, but I can de-mag some 8-tracks and make my own 8-tracks from there.

And they sound pretty nice.”

But when Deming and his wife had their first child, Deming’s focus changed. Fatherhood became priority No. 1. Besides, he’d been promoted at Muzak to a position as Audio Architect, responsible for compiling and assembling the music playlists for Muzak’s customers, and he’d started a fruitful backyard gardening hobby. He was occupied.

Two albums on the Wigfarm website, Crosstalk and Twisted Just So, are labeled “available soon...” and have been since the site went up four years ago.

But, he promises, “I’ve still got tunes going. You can’t just turn shit off. You can sorta say, ‘I quit,’ but it takes a long time to do that.”

He’s never made it publicly available, but his post-Wigfarm tinkering has led to some novel concepts. In the two years between his sons’ births, Deming started collecting cassettes at thrift stores, buying bags of unlabeled tapes for pennies. He rummaged through their contents, finding snippets to paste together, “making kind of a radio show” out of the piles of discarded Gospel, heavy metal and random spoken word passages he’d come across. “I just pieced together some programs like this, and I thought, ‘Oh, that might be kind of cool to stick onto this.

It’d certainly be out of step with what’s there now.’”

Another project echoes the Flaming Lips’ infamous Zaireeka — in which four albums must be played concurrently from different 18 Blake Deming shuffle Thirteen

positions in a room. In Deming’s project, four portable 8-track players, each loaded with a different cartridge, are arranged in a circle. One plays a percussion track, another might be keys or ambient samples, and so on. “They’re interactive, because if you push each one, a little something comes out,” he says. “I like that idea a lot. It’s different in that I’m not trying to sync anything up, per se. You don’t have to hit anything at the same time.”

That project is still in the works, and Deming is uncertain how it might be made accessible to an audience. It’s not actually that he doesn’t give a shit — he just hasn’t figured out how to pull it off, it’s not at the top of his priorities, and these things don’t just happen on their own.

“I would love to just switch gears,” he says, “and be discovered as some kind of guy that was forgotten, this dude that nobody ever paid attention to. ‘Poor him! Poor him, who really suffered with the rejection! He was neglected!’ And then, triumphantly, he returned, and conquered the universe! Man, I would love that.”

“But, no. I’m realistic.” shuf13

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The Rosebuds Saturday, September 10: outside The Lincoln Theatre- 11am-5:30pm Also featuring: Ben Sollee , Hammer No More the Fingers, Youth Lagoon, Shirlette & The Dynamite Brothers, The Big Picture, & Tonk.

Proceeds from food sales to benefit The Frank Lemmon Foundation

New. Improved.

Expanded. shufflemag.com Come check out the new site.

More of what you love about Shuffle, lots more to come.

Storm Rolling In Charlotte punk outfit Brain F≠tightens its focus and upgrades its hooks to create a roaring debut LP

By Jordan Lawrence

I

f you were looking for a metaphor to describe the driving garage-punk of Charlotte’s Brain F≠, a tornado would be a fine place to start. Nick Goode’s cyclonic riffs, Eddie Schneider’s kinetic bass lines and Bobby Michaud’s bruisingly physical drumming combine into a blur of dirty, damaging rock. Goode and singer Elise Anderson circle each other with an array of vocal hooks and hard-hitting lines that add irresistible intensity, resulting in a gusty — but also catchy — blur that you can’t escape.

It’s fitting, then, that an actual tornado contributed to the sound of Sleep Rough, the band’s exciting debut LP. Late on the afternoon of April 16, as Goode and Anderson laid down the devilish call-and-response vocals for the herky-jerky gem “Hand in a Jar,” a very rare yet very destructive tornado tore by their South Raleigh recording spot. It barely missed them and knocked over a 60-foot oak tree, which fell in the opposite direction of the house. Their headphones shielded them from the roar, but it’s clearly audible in the final mix. It provides additional and appropriately rough accompaniment to Goode’s grinding distortion, while bolstering the song’s ruthless, jeering barbs with a jagged, stormy edge.

Naturally, the band decided to incorporate the tornado’s roar as it was; Brain F≠ see their records as documents of the moment of creation, and refuse to polish the rough patches with production tricks or excessive overdubs. Maintaining the tornado’s presence fit right in with that aesthetic.

“The approach was — and I was really adamant about this — let’s not polish it at all,” Goode says. “This is how we sound. This is a document of where we’re at right now. It’s like when you get a bad tattoo to remember something that happened. It’s a sign of this time. You still like it, and you can remember it, and it totally brings you back so hard, too.”

A few years ago, you could find Goode riding up and down I-85 and I-40 several times a month to catch punk shows in Raleigh. Charlotte wasn’t exactly a punk rock hotbed, he and his bandmates explain, and tends to ignore bands on the fringes.

Press outlets seem largely dismissive or oblivious to outsider talent, and most venues seem equally reticent to book it. This has forced punk bands to survive underground, largely at house shows. That’s actually turned out to be a healthy development for the scene and its bands. In the last couple of years, those shows, held mostly in the dirty basement of West Charlotte’s Sewercide Mansion, or at Lunchbox Records in Plaza-Midwood, have given birth to a ferocious font of loud bands: The brilliantly blackened Young and in the Way, the perverse, blues-infused Paint Fumes and another of Goode’s bands, the endlessly brutal Joint Damage, being just three examples.

Of this scene, Brain F≠ are the best and most connected.

Goode, in addition to leading Joint Damage, plays in the reactivated Logic Problem, a precise, studied punk band that’s been around since 2008. Schneider drums in Yardwork, a poprock band filled with former and current punk rockers whose

Photos by Allie Mullin. Bottom left photo by Bryan Reed

signature is attacking that bright style with hardcore intensity.

Michaud manned the kit for short-lived noise-rock powerhouse Grids and currently plays with Raleigh’s Double Negative.

Anderson contributed vocals on a new platter from garage-pop act Coma League. It’s an impressive resume, which – paired with the band’s unstoppable sound – has made them de facto leaders for Charlotte’s burgeoning punk scene, and worthy ambassadors beyond it.

• • • Today, Brain F≠ sits crammed into a small booth at Growlers Pourhouse, a fancy, wood-and-stone bedecked bar in Charlotte’s North Davidson art district. Its specialty is limited-quantity craft beer, but it offsets these pricey offerings with a $2 PBR special. It’s a refreshing balance, one mirrored in Brain F≠’s music. Razorsharp hooks merge with the heft of dense, distorted rock, resulting in a sound that’s as catchy as it is crushing.

Goode is ostensibly the band’s leader. His riffs lead the charge in the band’s instrumental dynamo. He also helps craft the vocal parts with Anderson. But he’s not in control right now. As he speaks, he sips frugally from his pint. He’s precise, but quiet, and his bandmates make it hard for him to express his ideas succinctly. They latch onto the ends — and middles — of his sentences, using them as stepping stones to illuminate their own thoughts on the band. Their recollections reveal themselves in tumbles; members interrupt each other to pile on their neighbors’ points.

Though soft-spoken, Goode pairs his words with a warm, charming look, his blue eyes shining amidst his scruffy, sandyblonde hair and beard. Elise jumps past his points with quick, high-pitched rants that are every bit as piercing as her green eyes. She wins the “Best Dressed” award, too, her tailored V-neck pairing nicely with jean shorts and stylish flats. Schneider, too, manages to say his piece, barreling through in husky outbursts.

Michaud, while a racket behind the kit, is the quiet one here, sitting back and listening, occasionally chipping in with a sniping joke or quick summation of what’s been said. Eventually someone derails the conversation with an aside, and the group moves on pell-mell to a different subject. 

shufflemag.com 21

Storm Rolling In (cont’d) “We all talk a lot and interrupt each other and make jokes on top of each other’s jokes,” Anderson says, poking fun at the way they continually talk over each other. “Can you put lines of text over lines of text? I think that’s the best way to write it.”

Goode places the band’s inception at the house he shared with Michaud and Anderson in 2009. Logic Problem was nearing hiatus; Grids was as well, so Goode and Michaud began experimenting together. They reached out to Schneider when they heard he also played bass. The trio flirted with the idea of having Yardwork’s other drummer, Taylor Knox, sing for them, but chose Anderson. “Elise was the only one that showed up to practice,” Goode laughs.

They tire of the origin story quickly, preferring to riff on the laborious process that led to their name.

“We spent more time thinking up band names than writing songs, for the first couple practices at least,” Anderson says, shaking her head playfully.

They list the once-prospective monikers, admiring them like items from a scrap book. Schneider takes the roll of historian, recalling names such as Scab Members, Chinese or Whatever, and Stink Lines. He later recalls the band seriously considering Ragin’ Uptown, the name of a Queen City party bus. As he recounts the ideas, his bandmates alternately jeer and compliment their own creativity. A couple of years ago this was a serious and troublesome debate for a new band. Now, it’s fodder for a tight crew — tighter now, thanks to the beer — to engage in jovial selfmockery. Eventually, they settled on Brain Flannel, and released a five-song demo cassette before adopting the official shorthand.

Like the tumult of their overlapping discussions, the instrumentalists assert their own identities and styles, but still leave room for the other players to make their mark. Michaud pummels his kit with unflinching forcefulness, recalling the rough-shod attack he displayed in Grids. Schneider injects

22 brain f≠ shuffle Thirteen Photos by Bryan Reed

extra propulsion on bass, replicating the spark plug role he plays in Yardwork’s frenetic assault. Goode fires off guitar lines with so much vigor that he constantly seems ready to veer out of control.

Amazingly, they’re able to wrap these approaches into a seamless force that leaves just enough room for Anderson’s semi-sweet sneer. The results are structurally similar to the Minutemen’s quick romps and rocket along in the way of Hüsker Dü’s loudest moments, but Brain F≠ are harder and hookier than either of those references suggest.

“You can know what my voice sounds like, or know what Bobby’s drumming style is, but you don’t really know what they’re going to bring to the table until you start doing it,” Anderson says.

“The more time we’ve spent together, and the more shows that we’ve played and the more that we’ve actually worked on writing, it’s changed.”

And so it has. “Restraining Order,” the first song the band ever wrote, is a far cry from the slick salvo that appears on Sleep Rough. The song, released on a 2010 7-inch of the same name, showcases a rougher, less synchronized outfit than the one Brain F≠ has become. It rides a pulsing, near-surf-rock combo of guitar and bass, and Michaud’s drumming is simplistic until the choruses, when he lets loose in captivating tantrums that stray too far from the song’s driving core. Goode sings the verses largely on his own, wrapping his dry bark around a crass, creepy tale of a stalker that just can’t keep his distance. Anderson joins him during the song’s earworm chorus, accentuating the hook with her sweeter tones.

“Obviously there was a foundation there,” Schneider says.

“Early on, even when it was just three of us, it was kind of different. What it was going to go to was there. We talked about it too. That one song is where it finally came together.”

The distance between that first step and Sleep Rough’s bold leap forward is astonishing. On the LP, Brain F≠’s instrumental core operates as an impregnable unit. They move with unstoppable momentum, executing every maneuver with precision, never letting any show of individual prowess take away from the band’s collective energy. They relent to a cutting guitar slash here or a few rhythmic body blows there, but they manage these flare-ups skillfully, preventing them from disturbing the band’s steadily roaring blaze.

As good as Sleep Rough’s instrumentals are, it’s the vocal arrangements that will really turn heads. For the first time, Goode and Anderson sat down and wrote out their vocal melodies before recording. The effort results in highly intricate parts that pile hooks on top of hooks, escalating momentum to the point of near whiplash.

“It’s a lot more fun to try to weave a melody in between music that you think is badass than hearing the melody before you ever even finish the song,” Anderson says. “It’s challenging sometimes to write. We get together, and sometimes we’ll write immediately, and sometimes we’ll sit there for hours and be like, ‘Uhhhh, maybe . . . ,’ you know? It’s not easy.”

Despite their considerable nuance, Brain F≠ is — adamantly — still a punk band.

Their songs take cheap, politically incorrect shots at society. The searing one-minute romp “Lie About Diet” takes aim at America’s nutrition woes with zingers like, “All we eat is chicken shit/ Kitchen’s full of frozen dishes/ Boxes full of freezer meat.” They’ve turned the “F≠” in their name into a readily tagged symbol, printing it onto stickers that often wind up replacing “f”s on other stickers on the walls of clubs they play. When LP sleeves didn’t arrive in time for them to hit the road in July, they put together a “Tour Edition” of Sleep Rough, spray painting a stencil of their symbol onto leftover covers from labelmate Deep Sleep’s recent Turn Me Off. This punk identity was clear during a recent performance at Raleigh’s Berkeley Café. Brain F≠ found themselves wedged in the middle of a hardcore bill, ranging from the devastating hardcore of Stripmines only as far as the Black Flag-aping tricks of Rochester’s Rational Animals.

“We play like 80 percent of our shows with garage bands, maybe 70 percent,” Goode says. “But they have different motives.

We’re not going to try to make our band sound like anything. Our band is what it is, and you can only put a label on it as to how you operate. We totally operate as a punk band.”

The young punks in Raleigh didn’t quite know what to make of Brain F≠’s hook-driven attack. A few started to mosh, but their attempts sputtered quickly. Far from letting the crowd’s confusion break their stride, Brain F≠ turned it to their advantage. They flew headlong through a quick, relentless set that never took longer than a breath between songs. In doing so, the band kept the crowd off balance, screwing with their heads to impress their sound upon them.

Brain F≠’s members are so sure of their band, and what it aims to be, that they feel it can survive the shakeups that will hit the band in the coming months. After a pair of September performances during Raleigh’s Hopscotch Music Festival, the band will enter a period of hiatus. Anderson is moving to New York to start a new job. Michaud is contemplating a move later in the year, too, most likely to Raleigh. Despite the impending difficulties, they are relaxed about the future. They’ve begun writing songs for a new LP, and they’re planning a tour for later in the fall. They’re convinced that their bond and belief in the music are too strong for any distance to split up.

“I don’t think any of us have any desire to stop doing what we’re doing, but I think the mindset is that we’re going to do what we need to do to pay our bills and do what we want to do,” Anderson says. “But I mean, this morning I scheduled my first visit back [to Charlotte] for November. Everyone’s going to do their thing, and I don’t think the band needs to be an obstruction to the other things going on in our lives because it’s not a bad thing, and it never will be, and it never should be.”

For now, it appears Brain F≠’s raging, tornadic sound is as

irresistible for its members as it should be for its listeners. Like any storm system, it’s inevitable that they will dissipate and break up at some point. But even if they drift apart, be it a year from now or 10, they’ll have left an indelible mark on the region, reigniting Charlotte’s punk scene and giving it one of its best records in the process. This storm, it turns out, is only getting started. shuf13

shufflemag.com 23

On Her Grind

By Brian Howe

Durham’s Shirlette Ammons joins

the Dynamite Brothers, guest stars

a

to go ‘larger than this moment’

t 1:15 on a recent July afternoon, a compact figure came bopping into The Federal in Durham with a purposeful spring in her step that belied the reckless heat outside. She wore a form-fitting mesh jersey and low-slung jeans, with a metal stud piercing her lip and her dark hair skinned close on the sides. A journalist waiting at the bar noted that she was just late enough to be fashionable, but not so late as to require an explanation—perfectly played. The bartenders cried “Shirlette!” in unison, saluting the musician, poet, and Durham fixture. It felt like being in an unusually fresh episode of Cheers.

She whisked the journalist into a quiet rear dining room, explaining en route that she would be intermittently fielding calls from people at the NC Museum of History, who were to record her saying “I’m from North Carolina” for a permanent installation.

After they ordered veggie-burger sliders (his) and pimento cheese (hers), she began to explain the origins of her new album of soul, funk, hip-hop and more, And Lovers Like, which features backing by local journeymen the Dynamite Brothers and a cornucopia of guest stars. But then she broke off mid-sentence to trade slang with a tattooed passerby who may or may not have been a shaved bear. (Dude was burly.) “I’m politicking,” she said, indicating the journalist.

People, this is official: Shirlette Ammons is on her grind.

Her name already rings out in North Carolina, but she wants more. The dominant traits of And Lovers Like—the new focus on everyday life, the cultural cross-section of collaborators and

24 Shirlette shuffle Thirteen

styles—stem from her desire not to be just a local artist, a local African-American artist, or a local African-American queer artist. She is all of these things, and they’re all reflected in the record, which is largely narrative and autobiographical. But it’s simultaneously more personal and more universal than her work as a poet and with the band Mosadi Music, where commentary on culture, gender, and race can be found in greater supply than lived experience. Ammons is widening her aim—and hopefully, her audience along with it.

“I’m all about legacy,” she said, reflecting on artists who achieved it while neither hiding nor amplifying their sexual orientation. “For me, Me’Shell Ndegéocello was the one who made queerness not the focus of the music, but a part of it—the music stood alone. It wasn’t just that she was a ‘gay artist;’ she was good.

If you want to go back further, to [early-twentieth century blues singer] Bessie Smith, she was queer and a dope-ass musician who included her experience in music she was making for everyone.”

“That’s the audience I want,” she went on, holding it in her mind’s eye—litanical now, the poet coming through. “That’s the audience I want, who’s willing to be emotionally expansive and not require you to look or be one way all the time. Who’s cool with a loud guitar but also with a nice wah-wah rhythm. Who can hear funk in a way that’s not sterile. An expansive audience who’s willing to make us larger than this moment.”

But if Ammons has one eye on a broader horizon, the other peers deeply within. “Introspection” is a concept that came up again and again. It’s the quality that first attracted her to the Dynamite Brothers, who have a sensitive feel for pensive funk and soul. And it’s the quality that she sought to achieve in her lyrics.

“I was approaching 40,” the 37-year-old said, “and I’d never written about fucking, or being in love, or being in flux. It’s probably because I’m country, and raised Christian, and queer. So how do you manage all that? But I think we now live in a moment

Photo of Shirlette Ammons by Katina Parker

when, even though we are marginalized, it’s valuable to chronicle queerness in a way that’s not necessarily…un-normal.” In other words, the journalist suggested, a street-level view, rather than more symbolic, bird’s eye-type stuff.

“Yeah,” Ammons nodded. “Why do you have to dress up in a meat suit? Can I just rock my t-shirt and jeans?”

• • • If you follow hip-hop mixtapes, then you’re familiar with the concept of rappers adding new vocals to pilfered instrumentals.

Think of any number of high-profile Lil Wayne tapes—figuratively, of course; “mixtape” is an anachronism for these digital artifacts—or Clipse’s We Got it for Cheap series. That’s kind of what Ammons has done here, with key differences. Instead of cherrypicking chart-hop beats, she went ham on a set of instrumentals from one record, the Dynamite Brothers’ 2009 LP, Again. Instead of tossing off freestyles, she wrote fleshed-out songs that were laced with hip-hop but more deeply rooted in funk and soul. And instead of just jacking the music, she worked with the band’s blessing and participation—though it sounds like at least a hint of coercion was involved.

“It all started with me and Mitch [Rothrock],” Ammons said.

“He’s solid, man. He has a gentle heart.” The gentle-hearted Dynamite Brothers frontman had been a fill-in guitarist for Mosadi Music, and Ammons bonded with him over a mutual love of the vintage analog sound. “I get antsy when Mosadi and my poetry are at a lull,” Ammons said, “and want to work with other people’s ideas” – a situation she found herself in around 2008. “So I’d hit up Mitch like, ‘Send me some music! Send me some music!’

I just wanted to fuck with something.”

Ammons worked on the instrumentals intermittently, adding vocals in Garageband, and then put them aside. Fast-forward to the 2009 release of Again, when hearing some of the same instrumental parts she’d fucked with inspired her to send her 

shufflemag.com 25

On Her Grind

(cont’d)

own efforts to the Dynamite Brothers, who dug them. They had the idea of making an album using Again instrumentals with a different artist on each track. “But I had already done so many!”

Ammons recalled. “I was geeking out on it.” So they decided to make the album “Shirlette & the Dynamite Brothers” while keeping the idea of having guests on every song.

Rothrock and Ammons pieced the record together from a patchwork of Again instrumentals, new music, and remote collaborators. She got Kelly Crisp of the Rosebuds to sort of rap, in the style of Blondie’s “Rapture,” on “Nevamind,” which was originally the Dynamite Brothers’ “In Time.” She had Applejuice Kid record Yahzarah in his home studio. Daniel Hart emailed in what Ammons correctly described as the “sick violin outro” of “Kissin’ and Cussin’,” a remake of a song by former Carolina Chocolate Drop Justin Robinson.

But don’t think the record was assembled by cold committee—it has a live, organic feel, and there is evidence that Ammons ran

26 Shirlette shuffle Thirteen

the show. “Mitch sent me this programmed drums and bass demo he called ‘Intergalactic Love Affair,’” Ammons said, cracking up affectionately. “I was like, ‘[That title] is awful, man! This needs work.’” The gospel-tinged tune appears on the record, thankfully, as “The Catch Up.” It’s all part of the plan to nudge things away from the exotic and abstract, toward the everyday and tangible. For another example, Ammons wanted opening song “The Shakes” to be “kind of crass and lustful”—so of course, she hit up local rapper Juan Huevos.

In back-to-back verses, they each take on the venerable hip-hop topic of meeting a hottie on the street, forging camaraderie between two experiences—gay African-American female and straight Caucasian male—that are often portrayed as worlds apart.

“People may not notice at first that we’re both using the ‘she’ pronoun,” Ammons said. “I think that’s cool.” shuf13

Photo of Shirlette Ammons and the Dynamite Brothers by Ariel Dawn

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Megafaun Megafaun Hometapes

Illustration by Taylor Williams

T

riangle-based experimental folk trio Megafaun were bold enough to name their fourth – and likely to be breakthrough – album after themselves. It’s a move that carries a ton of baggage.

An eponymous title implies that the music captures the essence of the band. That’s a hard task for any outfit. But for Megafaun, a Rolling Stone “Band to Watch” on the brink of indie stardom, it creates an expectation that this record sums up the myriad achievements that have lead them to this precipice.

It’s a shame. Megafaun is a fine record, one that flaunts and even improves upon a few of the tricks that have turned these well-bearded gurus into unlikely scene leaders. But as good as it is, it’s not really the Megafaun fans of their first three records have come to know and love.

The band – brothers Phil and Brad Cook, and lifelong friend Joe Westerlund – built their reputation on a bold mix of rugged, almost old-timey folk, jazz-based improvs, and modernist noise built from field recordings and electronic manipulation. And while Megafaun keeps much from that approach, it largely rests on different foundations.

It’s a big, sprawling affair that covers a ton of ground, ranging from the gorgeous piano balladry of “Hope You Know” to the looping, rhythmic samples of lead single “These Words.” Still, it mostly moves like many of the classic double rock LPs from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Like those records, Megafaun is willing to mostly shroud its eccentricities — the band’s strong suit until now — in service of a sweeping experience that shifts from

style to style with nary a bump (or risk) along the way.

This smoothness is the record’s greatest asset. The plodding backbeat and haunting reverb guitar lines of opener “Real Slow” cascade seamlessly into the recorded surf-splashes that begin “These Words.” A tumult of concussive drums, hypnotic chimes and textured field recordings, “These Words” is the best song here, but also the furthest outlier from the traditional folk and rock palette on display through most of the record.

The arresting transition integrates the song flawlessly, mitigating any shock at its contrasting sounds.

The record is rife with such potent song pairings. The way the percolating noise of “Serene Return” diminishes into the strumming, hornfilled spiritual “You Are the Light” is particularly wowing.

Still, it’s hard not to want more of the old ‘Faun from these songs. Experimental elements bubble up here and there, but this record is mostly an exercise in modernizing accepted rock forms. “Second Friend” coopts string-bound Beatles pop into the trio’s druggy folk without a hitch, and “Scorned” is a fiery bit of backwoods blues that distorts harmonica into wrenching shrieks of agony.

But in the light of the band’s boundary-obliterating past, it’s hard to see the record’s achievements as revelatory. It’s an absorbing trek into bountiful territory for a trio of luminary talents, but it gets by on sounds you’ve likely heard a hundred times over. It’s a successful outing, but as a self-titled LP it fails. This is not the essence of Megafaun.

—Jordan Lawrence

shufflemag.com 29

Dan Melchior Und Das Menace Catbirds and Cardinals Northern Spy

D

an Melchior is not one to dwell on the past. He’s spent the past decade building a catalog that’s distanced himself further and further from past associations, incrementally increasing the divide with each release. That came to a head on this year’s Assemblage Blues — billed as a solo set and released by the respected Siltbreeze label.

Even relative to Melchior’s other work, Assemblage Blues was a left-field excursion.

Side A closes with “90s Man (Pt. 2)” and “January 1996,” a brilliant but particularly challenging pair. First Melchior chastises misplaced nostalgia over a hypnotically meandering guitar and whirring noise, then listeners are treated to a bleak and bitter noise-and-electronics spoken-word outing. Billy Childish wasn’t even on the same planet.

But now it seems as if Melchior might be ready to let down his guard. Catbirds and Cardinals, his second full-length of the year, reveals the British ex-pat’s underrated talent as a pop songwriter, even as he kicks and rips against the polish that honor suggests. “Poison Pete’s Holiday” turns a Kinksworthy jaunt celebrating the titular asshole leaving town for a few days into something much bigger as an ocean swell of buzzing keys erupts beneath its distorted and delayed acoustic guitar.

“Drama Queens on Prozac” is a similarly scathing and grininducing pop song that trades in both effervescent hooks and lo-fi scuzz. “English Shame” earns its role as lead single by punching its way through a dense arrangement

of keyboard drones, insistent percussion and surging guitars. The draw here is Melchior’s writing. His homeland, he sings, is “like a parent or a fucked-up friend / You criticize them endlessly, but fight anyone who / Dares to join in.” On the one hand, there’s William Blake; on the other, there’s the pontificating Sting.

But in terms of songwriting, this isn’t uncharted territory for Melchior. He’s played the snarky popsmith before.

Albums like 2002’s This Is Not The Medway Sound and 2005’s The Covert Stomp (a compilation of cuts recorded between 1993 and 2002) were crammed with indelible hooks and cunning punchlines.

But Catbirds is no return to form. Melchior is entirely in character here, taking the noise-blasted lessons of his deliberately challenging recent output to make his hooks bigger — and more fiercely barbed. In its wash of crackling static and buried, melancholy vocal, “Crow Radio #2” wouldn’t feel out of place among the fuzz-fried and free-form experiments of Assemblage Blues. Neither, for that matter, would “Catbird,” which subverts its straightforward pop structure with a busy and blown-out arrangement, multi-tracked vocals and omnipresent static prickles.

But at its best — which it most often is — Catbirds and Cardinals feels innovative not because it denies the past, but because it mines the past for old fragments for a new collage.

—Bryan C. Reed

30 Editors' Picks shuffle Thirteen

The Collection — The Collection (Self-released) Built on a similar orchestral template, the banjo-keys-glockstrings-brass-woodwinds-timpani-boy/girl-vocals-etc. of David Wimbish’s Greensboro collective may at first recall the figurine-songs of Sufjan Stevens – but only until one of the 12member band’s delirious crescendos erupts. Wimbish employs as many as 20 instruments per track, yet the arrangements are judicious when they need to be – fellow Carolinians’ Lost in the Trees would be another touchstone — and frenetic enough to hint at Neutral Milk Hotel’s controlled pandemonium when required. There’s a biblical thread to the narratives — Lazarus rises up early on — but The Collection is testimony enough that this a band to keep tabs on. (JS) The Foreign Exchange — Dear Friends: An Evening with The Foreign Exchange (Foreign Exchange Music) Truly satisfying live records are a rarity. The Foreign Exchange’s Dear Friends is one such gift. On their studio work, the duo of producer Nicolay and crooning ex-Little Brother Phonte Coleman cover sharp R&B with a late-night sheen of processed beats and synths. Here, in front of a studio audience in Durham, they deploy acoustic guitars, piano and simple — but silky — harmony courtesy of singers Sy Smith and Jeanne Jolly. “All Roads,” a sparkling build of spacey keys on last year’s Authenticity, becomes a stark, acoustic ballad that, like many songs here, showcases the emotional depth of Phonte’s voice. (JL) John Howie, Jr. and the Rosewood Bluff — Leavin’ Yesterday (Hands Up!) Trumping all the crap shat out by Music Row and even his fine Two Dollar Pistols catalog, John Howie Jr. and his George Jones/Ray Price-cured baritone lead a stellar new band through his finest set of songs yet: driving country rockers, honky tonk barn-burners, sad-bastard laments, and even some vintage countrypolitan (courtesy of the Lindsay Avenue Strings). Heartache is the narrative currency here, and Howie’s characters are filthy rich: Everybody’s leavin’ or gettin’ left, trust is in short supply, and the jilted multitudes find alcoholic solace from a “world of pain.” The interplay between guitarist Dustin Miller and pedal steel player Nathan Golub is an album-long highlight captured just-so by producer Brian Paulson, a man who knows his country-rock. These songs don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are, and the universal truths in them ring that much truer for it. Too bad Nashville’s forgotten that simple lesson. (JS) Old Bricks — City Lights (Grip Tapes) The sophomore release from the Carrboro band started by Stuart Edwards and Andy Holmes initially reads like a leftturn from the acoustic creak-and-creep of their 2010 debut, Farmers. But even newly swaddled in reverb glaze, framed in shadowy synths or organ washes, and powered by low-thrust percussion, City Lights’ forms a compatible bookend: urban bedroom studio counterparts to rural backporch fare. The unifying thread is the lonely late-night feel, relaxed tempos and Edwards’ warble now haunted by an undercurrent of pysch-rock paranoia rather than “What’s-lurking-in-thewoods?” foreboding. Whether casting shadows on empty city streets or in the flickering campfire-light, though, Old Bricks’ songs – forlorn but ultimately redemptive – exert hypnotic pull. (JS)

Small Platters Shane Perlowin — Shaking the Phantom Limb (Open Letter) Asheville’s Shane Perlowin is best known for adding impressive texture as the guitarist in far-flung rock outfit Ahleuchatistas. This solo outing proves he’s equally talented in the acoustic realm. Available as a free download, the album consists of eight intricate and engrossing solo guitar pieces.

Perlowin tumbles through quick finger picking with amazing dexterity, fusing myriad styles into one. There’s folk twang in his technique, but his harmonics ring with classically inspired counterpoint and his slide passages have a strikingly Eastern feel. Impressively, Perlowin pulls all this off without a single effect – just the warm tones of an acoustic guitar. (JL) Dex Romweber Duo — Is That You in the Blue? (Bloodshot) There are three guest vocals on the Dex Romweber Duo’s debut LP, Ruins of Berlin, but they dominate the album. Cat Power, Neko Case and Exene Cervenka all duet with Romweber, overshadowing the former Flat Duo Jet’s raw rock & roll power.

Is That You in the Blue? is a better showcase. Here, he does all the singing. Tenacious two-minute sprint “Jungle Drums” is ignited by Romweber’s snarling hook and rumbling guitar.

“Nowhere” follows a lonely, simple blues riff as his booming pipes explore the pain of a man without a home. Guests be damned, Romweber’s better without the help. (JL) Various Artists — Dick’s Picks 4006 (Self-released) Dick’s Picks 4006 is just a compilation of bands Whatever Brains frontman Rich Ivey counts among his friends and favorites, meant to stock its contributors’ merch tables. It’s not the type of collection that sets out to document any particular time or place. Still, it does. Drawing mostly from North Carolina and Virginia, the tape plays like an ace regional comp. There’s not a dud in the bunch, but My Mind’s “Thank You, Master” is a resplendent power-pop tune, Shards’ “God’s A Cop” is loose and slurry hardcore at its finest, and Super Vacations turn in a particularly winning dream-punk jam in “Hexing.” (BR) Various Artists — Future: YALL (Self-released) The S.C. music scene is on the rise. For proof, see Future: YALL, a new, well-stocked compilation of experimentalleaning Palmetto State bands. Spearheaded by members of dub-y Columbia rock outfit Forces of the Street, the album spans an array of cerebral rock styles, and the vast majority succeed. Pan’s “The Highlands” is an energetic post-rock build that could satiate any Explosions in the Sky acolyte. The Seawolf Mutiny’s “Heavy to Hold” achieves what Coldplay’s Eno era hasn’t, piling lush reverb onto arena balladry that helps, not hinders, its emotional impact. Nation, take notice: South Carolina’s got talent. (JL) Whatever Brains — Whatever Brains (Sorry State) The 17 tracks comprising Whatever Brains’ debut LP range from “Gross Urge”’s cacophonous mutation of strident NewWave to the acoustic guitar stagger of “Chivalry In The Dope Den;” from the budget hip-hop beats backing “I Know Where Graham Simpson Lives” to the spiky post-punk of “Shelves.”

The Raleigh quintet wears a mischievous grin as it traipses through the legacies of rock eccentrics like The Fall and The Country Teasers, frontman Rich Ivey alternately inhabiting loathsome characters and wishing their worst anxieties upon them. For all the gleeful provocation, though, the divergent sounds of Whatever Brains’ skewed post-punk deliver more than enough. (BR)

Polvo “Heavy Detour” b/w “Anchoress” 7-inch (Merge) Who are you, and what have you done with Polvo?! Sacrificing sudden lunges and ringing guitar flutters for blunted blockbuster rock, A-side “Heavy Detour” is kind of like that time Chris Cornell sang a Bond theme. “Anchoress” doesn’t fare much better on the flip, fumbling through shoegaze and cheese-prog synth-smears.

Coma Cinema Abandoned Lands DL (Self-released) Mat Cothran follows the moody pop of this year’s Blue Suicide LP with a fun-size collection that pulls the best parts of lo-fi scuzz, mopey goth-rock, and mid-aughts lap-pop. Coupled with his “All music should be free” mentality, this plays like a fuzz-fried John Maus.

Double Negative Hardcore Confusion, Vols. 1 & 2 7-inches (Sorry State) These first two entries of a four-part series find the Raleigh punk linchpins at their best and baddest. Vol. 1’s “Writhe” is a relative epic, stretching its exit into a razors-in-taffy treat, while Vol. 2’s “Face Jam” is one of DN’s burliest — and most dangerously catchy — entries.

Vols. 3 and 4 have a lot to measure up to.

Horseback with Locrian New Dominions one-sided 12-inch (Utech) Horseback and Locrian are obvious complements, especially given the more noiseoriented direction Horseback’s most recent work has taken. As collaborators, they reach new depths of deliberately paced darkness, drawing from jazz percussion, drone and Om-like mantra-metal for a captivating, if occasionally unsettling, platter.

By Bryan C. Reed

Matt Northrup Word Is Bond CS (Full Spectrum) Sounding something like Noveller in noonday sunlight, mellowed-out Ratatat, or a chopped-n-screwed Paul Simon instrumental, Northrup delivers a bright, chiming set via looped-andlayered guitar.

One Another Keep Moving CDEP (Powerstance) Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, Superchunk and the Bouncing Souls all cast long shadows on this Charlotte trio’s second EP, but One Another’s too earnest and excited for hollow nostalgia.

Reigning Sound/Last Year’s Men split 7-inch (Scion A/V) Reigning Sound’s rock & soul rarely disappoints, and doesn’t here. The rookies-ofthe-year in Last Year’s Men give their idols a worthy complement, too. Almost makes you wanna buy a Scion. Almost.

Simple “Runner” b/w “The Heart Is A Tissue” 7-inch (Factor IX) It’s hard to imagine this platter not stirring the 90s-nostalgia indie rocker, what with all its ringing Comboland guitar, Pavement-y bass staggers and Barlow-worthy mumbles.

Young And In The Way/ Torch Runner split 7-inch (Headfirst) Though both are feral hardcore bands unafraid of negative space or searing noise, Greensboro’s Torch Runner provides a blunt-force complement to the sharp shrapnel in Charlotte-based YAITW’s blackened blasts.

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Organic Coffee Beer Art Music Music Schedule: greensborobean.com Book Shows: greenbeanbooking@yahoo.com 341 S. Elm St, Greensboro, NC 336-691-9990Â

Synthesizing a Weekend Moogfest’s Ashley Capps talks about the Asheville fest’s second year

A

shley Capps, the 56-year-old CEO of AC Entertainment, has been booking bands in Asheville since the 1980s. During that time, he took more than one touring artist on a pilgrimage to meet Bob Moog, the legendary inventor of the synthesizer that bears his last name.

(Moog passed away in 2005.) So in 2010, when the opportunity arose to expand on the modest, daylong Moogfest held in New York City each year and host it in the town Moog called home for the last 30 years of his life – well, if only all decisions were that clear-cut.

Of course it has also allowed Capps to expand his festival empire; he’s a co-founder of Bonnaroo, and runs Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival and Forecastle in Louisville, too. Last year’s inaugural Moogfest was, by almost all accounts, a big hit with both the 30,000 attendees and the Chamber of Commerce types. And this year’s expanded lineup and attendance, as well as more venues, suggests Moogfest has established itself as one of the unique festivals in the nation. Shuffle spoke with Capps over the phone from his Knoxville office.

The full Q&A with Ashley Capps is available on Shuffle’s newly launched website, www.shufflemag.com

SHUFFLE Tell us how Moogfest landed in Asheville?

Ashley Capps We started doing shows in Asheville a couple of decades ago.

The community’s always been very responsive in supporting the live music scene. A few years into it, I started encountering artists who wanted to meet Bob Moog who, frankly, until it first came up, I didn’t know was living in Asheville. So I met Bob a couple of times back then and took some artists to visit him; they ordered some of the instruments that he was making. But the fact that Moog was in Asheville, it became increasingly a Mecca for musicians to visit the Moog manufacturing company when they came to town to play. At the same time, we’re looking for new opportunities in Asheville, so it wasn’t too long before a festival concept emerged for me: Why not build a festival around Bob Moog and his legacy, this instrument that changed the history of music. We knew that there was the Moogfest that had been going on in New York, and some other isolated events created throughout the world. But my vision really was to bring it to the town that was Bob’s adopted hometown, the headquarters of the Moog manufacturing company where all these instruments were being made, and that the event, by virtue of being in Asheville, would really attain the profile that it deserved.

SHUFFLE There were complaints last year about overcrowding at some shows, and multiple artists on at the same time — what will you do differently this year?

AC Every festival has its learning experiences, and there are always things that you want to do and for whatever reason you can’t do in a given year. So there’s really a never-ending set of evaluations and re-evaluations and tweaking of the system, and then new things that you want to explore, and new ideas that you want to bring in to make it an even greater festival. The process of creation is really never-ending. Much of it we actually hope will be invisible, that it makes everything run more smoothly, and then some of it will be very visible. This year we’re planning on turning up the visual art experience on every level – whether it’s what you see on stage, how the venues feel, some surprises just out in the community, some installations, like the Eno installation. That element of the festival will show some real growth this year.

SHUFFLE How much bigger is this year’s festival?

AC Our major new component in terms of that this year is that we’re adding an outdoor venue. All I’ll say for now is that it’s not normally a music venue. It’ll be a great outdoor space, and just one more facet of the Moog experience. So that’s going to open up some of the possibilities in terms of what we’re able to present.

We’re still keeping this relatively small – we don’t want it to be too crowded. We want it to be a great experience for everyone who attends. So we’re limiting the attendance, but we’ll have room for a few more people; last year we kept it to 8,000 people a day. This year, probably go to more like 10,000 a day. (Editor’s note: The outdoor venue had not been finalized by press time.)

SHUFFLE There were a few bands on the bill last year that didn’t seem to have much to do with Moogs; how did you decide to bring in other bands that didn’t fit the mold, as it were?

AC We wanted the Moog theme to be a thread around which we built the festival, and not a box which contains it. So we certainly don’t want to be limited simply to artists who play Moog instruments.

And we don’t really want to be limited to artists who work in electronic music. Bob Moog really loved music, and he really loved a lot of acoustic music as well as electronic music. In many ways the theme of the festival is celebrating Bob Moog’s creative spirit, as much as it is about the specific instruments he invented.

SHUFFLE There were some complaints about there not being enough local bands on the bill last year…

AC We actually had several local bands on last year (Editor’s note: In 2010, four of the 61 acts were based in Asheville; this year, at press time, only Toro Y Moi was based in the Carolinas). I think it’s always important for a festival like this to try to acknowledge the local scene. We want to be careful, though, sometimes it’s challenging to do that. The last thing in the world we want to do is just put artists on there for the sake of putting them on there, then have them in a bad spot or nobody come to their show because they’re all at something else.

Photo of Ashley Capps courtesy AC Entertainment Top photo by Enid Valu

Interview conducted by John Schacht shufflemag.com 33

The nsider

Hopscotch Round the Clock In the second installment of our new series, Hopscotch co-director and Shuffle contributor Grayson Currin lifts the curtain on festival-making

I

am writing this sentence on the evening of August 1, which means that, in just more than five weeks, around 150 of my favorite bands in the world will either begin to get off of planes at the airport I pass every morning on the way to work or pull their sweat-and-smoke-filled vans into the town I’ve mostly called home for the last decade, Raleigh. I must apologize for the long lede sentence, but I have to admit that, lately, that’s the way my brain works—endless streams of thoughts that, by some miracle of sheer will or dumb luck or caffeinated chemistry, eventually find their way to resolution.

My brain doesn’t feel a little like mozzarella cheese that’s been left in the oven too long because I’m busy cherry-picking which of the 150 bands coming to Raleigh I’m actually going to see. Rather, it’s because, in five weeks, if I forget to answer the right e-mail yesterday or today or tomorrow or when you’re actually reading this sentence, there’s a chance that one of my 150 favorite bands in the world will not have a hotel room or the right amplifier or the proper meals when they come. I am the Co-Director of the Hopscotch Music Festival, the steadily growing and forever sprawling collection of local, regional, national and international acts that gather in Raleigh during the second weekend of this and the previous September. And right now, the two-month marathon of sorting final details and answering urgent e-mails is completely and unequivocally on.

For the inaugural festival, my official title was Curator, which correctly denoted that I spent a few months picking the bulk of the bands that came to town last September. But that title seemed a little too precious for two reasons. First, I don’t only deal with picking the music. My roles are a bit more multifarious than that, from assembling and editing biographies for every act we host and building an (AAN award-winning, might I proudly add) festival guide to tracking down sponsors and doing interviews about exactly what we think we’re up to. This year, for instance, I’m in charge of a panel of discussions that includes Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips and Mark Richardson, my boss at Pitchfork Media. I’m organizing a day party in front of the city’s largest rock club, and, between every few sentences I’m typing 34 Insider shuffle Thirteen

Hopscotch photo by Enid Valu

in this document, I’m sending the Director, Greg Lowenhagen, e-mails about which local artist should design our VIP bags.

Today, I’ve answered e-mails about bands that are playing Hopscotch (so far, Ben Sollee, Mt. Eerie, Diamond Rings, Ford & Lopatin, Dawn Golden and Rosy Cross…), bands that aren’t playing Hopscotch (some young Merge act I’m not sold on, Zoroaster, Girl Talk), band break-ups, venue websites and a new room we’re considering for 2012. It’s been a real keyboard party in this office, folks.

More importantly, though, I didn’t pick all the acts, a misconception we dealt with often last year. No, that’s a chore and a privilege that I shared and continue to share with Hopscotch’s founder, the aforementioned idea-a-minute multitasker Greg Lowenhagen. A former Tar Heel, Greg had the idea to start Hopscotch after he returned to the Triangle after stints in Chicago and Austin, cities both known for traditions of music festivals. Not only did he want to live in a region with a viable music festival, but he also just wanted to find a way to get some of his favorite bands into his city without moving.

And that, my festival-minded readers, is a really goddamn terrible reason to start a music festival, turns out. At last year’s Hopscotch, I saw one band play, and that was at an after party in some run-down warehouse around 4 a.m. I’m pretty sure Greg saw Kylesa, the last band of the last night, but if that show is anything but a fatigued blur of riffs and rhythms in his mind, he is a veritable lord in a land of runts; by that point, I was walking to my hotel room as fast as my wobbly legs would take me.

But it turns out Greg was completely right about the excitement that a festival can bring to an area. I’ve written about music in the Triangle for nearly a decade now. I sometimes received fan mail, and sometimes someone aside from members of a band I’d recently interviewed would recognize me. But since we’ve launched Hopscotch, strangers will stop me on the street to ask me about what they can expect from this year’s shows. I get e-mails from people who are simply excited about what we’re doing, asking how they can help. Those sorts of transmissions mean more work, sure, but they also mean people are excited about where they live, invested in their scenes and interested in the bands that, in five weeks, will walk among us. That puts my mind back together—and, ultimately, makes this last sentence much shorter.

—Grayson Currin

The White Mule Music Pub and Eatery 1530 Main Street Columbia, SC thewhitemule.com

Join us on Monday for Mindteaze Trivia with $1.50 Old School beers and Wednesday for Open Mic Nite with Greg Rue. We also serve lunch Mon–Fri 11am-2pm with a $6.99 pizza combo.

Sept. 17 Randall Bramblett Sept. 24 Adam Klein CD release party Sept. 22 Matrimony Sept. 30 Hannah Miller EP release Oct. 8 Chatham County Line Oct. 14 Whiskey Tango Review Nov. 25 Drew Dixon

FALL FESTIVALS’ MUST-SEE SETS

by John Schacht, Jordan Lawrence and Bryan Reed

Earth Photo by Sarah Barric

Sidi Touré Photo by Stina Ljungberg

HOPSCOTCH SEPT. 8-10, RALEIGH FESTIVAL PLANNER Hopscotch – Raleigh, Sept. 8-10 Tickets: $155 $155 (VIP 3-day wristband, sold out); $105 (All-Show 3-day wristband); $65 (All-Club 3-day wristband, sold out); $32 (Friday City Plaza Single Ticket); $34 (Saturday City Plaza Single Ticket) www.hopscotchmusicfest.com Moogfest – Asheville, Oct. 28-30 Tickets: General Admission: Weekend Pass Level 1 – $149.50 (sold out); Level 2 – $184.50; Level 3 – $199.50; VIP Festival Pass – $379.50 (single-day ticket prices unavailable at press time) www.moogfest.com Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival – Pittsboro, N.C., Oct. 6-9 Tickets: Adult 4-day $100; Youth (1315) 4-day $50; Thursday $25; Friday $35; Saturday $45; Sunday $25; $10 tent camping, $50 vehicle camping (discounts available with early purchases) www.shakorihillsgrassroots.org

Hopscotch offers plenty for just about every music fan, but it’s a music geek’s Valhalla, with headlining sets from the Flaming Lips, Superchunk, the Drive-By Truckers and the last-ever Guided By Voices reunion set. The latter, especially, is a no-brainer, but we’re also super revved-up about these gems: Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio — Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio is an avant-garde landmark. It relies on a single chord that builds into an army of guitars to create a wondrously rhythmic drone. Chatham will be assisted by an all-star local cast including Polvo’s Ash Bowie and Horseback’s Jenks Miller, as well as William Tyler and David Daniell.

Hearing it reverberate through Fletcher Opera Hall should not be missed. (JL) Earth — Don’t wander into Earth’s Hopscotch set unless you plan on staying for a while. Started in 1989 by Dylan Carlson, the band paved new ground for heavy music in the 90s, stretching bruising sludge into a vast, engrossing musical expanse. It’s music that you must get lost in to enjoy. But it’s worth taking the time. (JL) Steve Gunn — New York guitar wizard Steve Gunn performs three times at Hopscotch, which makes missing him difficult. Gunn’s work flows into husky acoustic blues, transcendental raga, blistering drone and territories between. Whether he’s meditating on modal explorations with percussionist John Truscinski, building walls of sound from solo acoustic overtones, or adding his smoky vocal to re-imagine Lou Reed as a Piedmont bluesman, Gunn’s music is always otherworldly and imaginative. (BR) The Men — Leave Home, the sophomore LP from New York’s The Men, is the most compelling punk album of 2011. The Men are are just as confident steering through murky shoegaze as they are riding intense, metallic swells; as prone to psychedelic goofiness as they are to dead-serious hardcore. That this band is still playing basements

36 Must See Sets shuffle Thirteen

is one of the world’s great mysteries; the sound is fit for arenas. (BR) Swans — For two hours, Swans will fill Fletcher Opera Hall with their far-flung palate of dark, oppressive sound. Their most recent LP, 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, finds them exploring big, blackened rock that ranges from outsized garage outbursts to drawn-out bouts of foreboding electronics. As they boom through the recesses of the city’s best-sounding venue, you’ll be able to explore Swans’ intricacies in all their grandeur. (JL) William Tyler — During his solo sets, Lambchop’s guitar wunderkind will occasionally break out a bow and have at his guitar’s strings. But it’s no self-indulgent arena-rock stance — the luminous looped textures provide an experimental context for guitar playing as grounded in Americana tradition as Charley Patton or John Fahey. As he’s said, the songs may not have words, but they all have stories. (JS) The Edward McKay Used Books & More Artist & Author Series — For anyone with even a passing interest in how the sausage gets made, these panel discussions can be true eye (and ear) openers. Thursday, Rhys Chatham, William Tyler and Xui Xui’s Jamie Stuart discuss Honoring and Outstripping Influences; Friday’s topic, Simple Words: The Power of Narrative Songs, features Patterson Hood (Drive-by Truckers), John Vanderslice, and Heather McEntire (Mount Moriah/Bellafea); finally, on Saturday, Flaming Lip Wayne Coyne headlines The Bubble: The Limits of Pop Music talk. (JS)

Michael Gira Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Battles Photo courtesy of One Thirty BPM

Brian Eno Photo courtesy of Bang On PR

ck Rhys Chatham Photo by Estelle Hanania

Holy Fuck Photo courtesy of Holy Fuck

MOOGFEST OCT. 28-30, ASHEVILLE

SHAKORI HILLS GRASSROOTS FESTIVAL OCT. 6-9, PITTSBORO

Strategically scheduled on a weekend that has been a cause for bacchanalia and extravagance since pagan times, Moogfest is a celebration of retrofuturism with displays of color and sound. Bob Moog, the synthesizer pioneer who gives the festival its name, would be proud. You’ll have something to be proud of, too, after witnessing these: Amon Tobin — Amon Tobin’s lush and complex compositions are compelling on their own; this year’s ISAM is a polyglot collision of musique concrète, glitch-pop and contemporary electronica.

But it’s more of a headphones record than a dancefloor banger. So to perform ISAM, Tobin and a team of engineers built a towering structure designed to incorporate real-time projection mapping, generative art, and reactive technologies to add a grand visual component to an already exciting soundscape. (BR) Atlas Sound — Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox has been seeding his hyperactive blog with “unofficial” ambient pieces from his Atlas Sound solo project, mostly through the Bedroom Databank Series, Vols. 1-4. Also showcased on two strong official releases, Cox’s digitized beats, anodyne tempos and plush oscillating textures are the perfect chill-out cloud to slow your roll in. (JS) Battles — After losing frontman Tyondai Braxton and the robotic-chipmunk chirping he brought to Battles’ debut, 2007’s Mirrored, the band refined its instrumental vision — mostly for the better. This year’s Gloss Drop is both mechanically dazzling and imminently danceable — club music for a post-human utopia. Of course, Battles’ center has always been one of rock’s most powerful and precise drummers, John Stanier. The former Helmet skinsman continues to astound, delivering beats both mathematical and Motorik. (BR)

The semi-annual gathering in Pittsboro, N.C. is a reliable source for rootsy, jammy, and worldly sounds with a solid slate of local bands to support its lineup. But the relatively modest festival still pulls in a few big wins every time. This time, you’d be remiss to miss out on these sets: Brian Eno’s An Illustrated Talk — Many musicians get linked to the visual through what critics inadequately label “soundscapes,” but that’s been Eno’s home-turf for over four decades.

For this event (a supplement to his 77 Million Paintings installation), Eno puts his fecund imagination to work — via an overhead projector — on topics like “generative art, haircuts, music history, screwdrivers, and the vast complexities behind them all.” The iconic Eno is his own Think Tank, and any forward-thinking music-lover should celebrate this festival tie-in. (JS)

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings — Sharon Jones got her start, like a lot of great secular soul singers, in church choirs. She soon immersed herself in the classic R&B of the 60s and 70s, but because people were exceptionally stupid in the 80s, her Staxflavored music was considered passé. Thankfully, she was rediscovered in the mid-90s and has slowly built the very-well-deserved reputation as heiress to the great soul ladies of the past. She’s backed by the excellent Dap Kings, comparable to some of the seminal era’s tightest and funkiest bands. (JS)

Holy Fuck — If you’re going to Moogfest to party, don’t miss Holy Fuck. It’s not that these Canadian electro-rockers are outgoing party-starters. On stage, they concentrate on their instruments fusing very live, very sensual bass lines to spazzy noise that ranges from ethereal hums to shrieking outbursts. The result is kinetic dance music that inundates you with layers of intricate rhythm. Holy Fuck won’t be in the crowd’s face, cajoling them to move. They don’t have to. Their music demands it. (JL)

Sidi Touré — At home in Mali, Sidi Touré is a revered and award-winning singer and leader of the regional orchestra, The Songhaï Stars. But his Sahel Folk, released earlier this year by the venerable Chicago label Thrill Jockey, is not an overthought production. In fact, his loping acoustic guitars and warm, unadorned vocal carry the casual air and unhurried pacing of an extemporaneous front-porch performance. His appearance at Shakori Hills is the only Carolinas date on Touré’s first-ever U.S. tour. (BR)

Suicide — When Suicide released their self-titled debut in 1977, they likely had little idea that it would continue to inspire new artists more than 30 years later. Yet, Martin Rev’s spooky, minimalist backdrops and Alan Vega’s volatile vocals wormed their way into generations of musical innovation, from synth-pop and goth rock, industrial and Krautrock, to post-punk and garage rock. To hear such a pinnacle of proto-punk’s anything-goes salad days in the flesh is a rare treat. (BR)

Peter Lamb and the Wolves — Shakori outof-towners shouldn’t skip this Triangle treat.

PLATW are a crack team of local jazz musicians that dig into stylish traditional jazz with such rich texture and vigor you’ll feel as if you’ve somehow stumbled into a side-street jazz bar in the 60s. Instrumental interplay is favored over virtuosic leads. A revolving door of piano, wind and rhythmic leads keeps things interesting as charming vocals organize the cuts into satisfying nuggets. (JL)

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Publisher’s Note

Issue #13

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Carolinas’ Independent Music Source

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THe PArTInG GIFTS

TORO Y MOI GETS FUNKY Chaz Bundick jazzes up chillwave

Charlotte sextet finds their voice on raucous debut

A VISION OF PARADISE N.C. label reissues David Lee soul gems

GREG & COCO, SWINGING IN A TREE… R-O-C-K-I-N-G! BACK TO THE DIY BLUEPRINT FOR SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS HIP-HOP AND JAZZ DÉTENTE FROM THE BEAST & NNENNA FREELON REGIONAL SCRIBES PICK 2010’S TOP CAROLINAS LPS

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here’s a good chance that you picked up your copy of this magazine at Hopscotch, Moogfest, or one of the many Carolinas-based music festivals that have either sprung up or grown steadily over the four years we’ve been publishing. There are now well over a dozen serious, well-attended independent music festivals that dot the Carolinas over the calendar year. Of these, Hopscotch and Moogfest have risen to levels of lineup quality and attendance that put them on par with the upper tier of well-known independent music festivals taking place across the U.S. This, no doubt, is a great sign of the overall health and steady growth of the independent music scene in the Carolinas.

Combined with the wealth of great music being produced here and the growing number of businesses engaged in the independent music scene, it’s hard not to take pride in what we have going on.

If this is your first time reading us — thanks!

Shuffle is a regional music magazine published quarterly that covers the grassroots/independent music scene in the Carolinas. With each issue we highlight the best of what our regional music scene has to offer, as well as provide a platform by which local scenes can share information and

audio offerings with other music fans in the next town over. Our writers, contributors and staff are scattered throughout North and South Carolina, and are always on the lookout for promising new local music. If there’s something you’d like to see us cover, please reach out to us via Facebook and let us know. If you’re a band or musician interested in submitting material for review, you can send your finished material (no demos, please) to: Shuffle Magazine Attn: Music Reviews P.O. Box 1777 Charlotte, NC. 28224-1777 We normally start the music review process within a few weeks of the release of the latest issue. Unfortunately, the number of submissions we receive always seems to exceed the number of pages we have to write about them, so please understand if we don’t get a chance to review your record.

If you’d like to see us distributed somewhere we’re currently not, please drop us a line on our Facebook page and we’ll see if we can add your location to our ever-growing list. With this issue,

@BHAG @BE<4;

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AHLEUCHATISTAS

Sonic Relocation for Noiserockers

COMA CINEMA

Fitting In by Standing Out

THE AQUALADS

Riding Another Surf Music Wave

we’re also happy to announce that we’ll soon be adding a subscription option for folks who’d like the magazine delivered to their mailbox.

You can also keep current with the daily musicrelated goings-on in the Carolinas via our Twitter account (@shufflemagazine), as well as our newand-much-improved website, which we’re thrilled to launch with this issue. (Just head over to www. shufflemag.com and bask in the user-friendly light.) Details on all the above can be found in the house ads below.

Finally, what we do is made possible by the advertisers who populate these pages and whose support is essential to our existence. If you’re a fan of what we do, we hope you’ll continue to support the folks who have stood up to support us and the music we write about.

Thanks for reading Shuffle, thanks for supporting what we do, and thanks for being a part of a great Carolinas music scene that just keeps getting better and better.

Brian Cullinan, Publisher Shuffle Magazine brian@shufflemag.com

Coming soon to a mailbox near you…. Shuffle Magazine!

Tired of fighting for that last issue of Shuffle at the coffee shop? Those days are over. Subscribe to Shuffle Magazine and we’ll come to you. 12 bucks gets all four yearly issues sent to your door and guarantees you won’t miss a thing.

More details available at: www.shufflemag.com/subscription