(Flyer via AdHoc)
Trash Talk, Antwon, Black Noise
Tuesday November 1, 8 pm to 11:30 pm at Brooklyn Bazaar: $15
Here’s to hoping you made it to Aviv Monday night for the grand finale. Super sad face. Actually, the last show was more of a bittersweet bye-bye for the DIY venue since the owners have promised a triumphant return ASAP, just as soon as they find a new space. RIP for now BBs, see you on the other side and all that.
Until then, we’re facing seriously slim pickins when it comes to decent venues that don’t require you to check your soul at the door in exchange to watch your favorite bands transform into blands right before your very eyes.
Brooklyn Bazaar has stepped in for some Market Hotel shows, while we wait for that venue to spring back into action. (In case anyone was harboring any doubt about whether or not they survived the “gotcha” police raid, Todd Patrick and crew have posted and reposted a reminder: “We’re still here.”) One such show features both a hardcore band from Southern California, Trash Talk, and hip-hop artist Antwon.
Now that’s a combination that might give some of you pause. But consider that Antwon, before moving to California and throwing himself head-first into hip-hop, got his start in the Philly hardcore/punk scene as part of the awesomely loud noise punk band, Leather. But, as he told Noisey recently, “there was no real transition”– as an artist and a listener he’s still into hardcore, something that’s clear when you seen Antwon in the flesh. As opposed to many of his contemporaries, Antwon is interested in breaking down the usual divide between artists and performer. We highly recommend checking him out in-person, it’ll change the way you listen to his music from here on out, for sure.
Silver Apples (Image via AdHoc)
Silver Apples, Forma, Bernardino Femmenielli
Wednesday November 2, 8 pm to 11:30 at The Good Room:$13
One of the pioneering electronic music acts, the Silver Apples formed in 1967. I mean, just look at that image above– see those barefoot hippies? Those sandal-wearing beatniks? Can you imagine what those cats thought of this stuff way back before the internet even existed? It must have blown their minds. Kaboom. Simeon looks like he’s captaining a spaceship, and you’d have no way of knowing what in the hell these guys were up to unless you believed in UFOs and followed the blipping and bleeping whispers straight to the transportive experience that was and are their live shows.
Somewhat more amazing is the fact that their 1969 classic, Contact, still holds up today. And word on the street is that the band, despite their AARP eligibility, killed it last year at Trans-Pecos. We’d never explicitly condone the use of psychedelics– not me not personally–but this guy I know says that they’re a must-have for this show.
M. Lamar’s The Demon Rising
Saturday November 5, 8 pm at The Kitchen: $15
Trust, a performance by M. Lamar is is like no other live music event you’ve ever experienced. That’s owed in part to the performer’s strange brew: classical music’s awe-inspiring feats of virtuosity, the composer’s powerful presence, and the epic, time-spanning stories and stage theatrics of opera. He does it all while remaining true to countercultural edge as a self-proclaimed “negro gothic devil-worshipping free black man in the blues tradition.” Sounds crazy? That’s because it is– well, it’s a response to a crazy, messed-up world, at least. M. Lamar embodies a complex tornado of influences, many of which draw from his position as a queer black man, and the tangled roots that this intersectionality implies.
M. Lamar’s latest effort, “The Demon Rising,” premieres at The Kitchen on November 5, and is described as a vocal/piano/projection-sound scape that’s partly “inspired by the grand jury testimony of Darren Wilson,” the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, and was subsequently acquitted by a Grand Jury who declined to charge him with Brown’s murder. Wilson gave testimony with overtly racist tones, describing Brown as having “the most intense, aggressive face […] it looks like a demon.”
“The Demon Rising embraces and incarnates white fantasies of blackness as oversized, superhuman, a supernatural menace. At the same time, it charts the black subject’s psychic and mythic odyssey from dehumanizing rituals of death toward a self-made re-membering.”