(Flyer via Mutual Crush)
Mutual Crush VII: Mzungu, Drunken Sufis, Amar
Wednesday November 11, 8 pm at Elvis Guesthouse: free
Ongoing live music series Mutual Crush returns with a show that “focuses heavily on noise/ambient music,” and a reminder that such sounds tend to “evoke a meditative reaction in the listener”– lord knows that’s just the ticket to sliding back into some semblance of normalcy after all this election garbage crap.
(Flyer via Duchess Says/ Shea Stadium)
Duchess Says
Friday October 14, 8 pm at Shea Stadium: $8
Saturday October 15, 8 pm at Elvis Guesthouse: $10 – $12
Duchess Says is the ’80s freak-wave/post-punk band you never knew you were dying for. Hailing from Montreal, they’re out to prove that Montreal’s really gaining on NYC right now in every way. And who can resist a band that sounds a whole like like what would happen if the Cars and the Slits had two babies, both born under the darkest of stars, then those babies mated with Halloween incarnate, then all the resulting offspring started a band. Yup. Picture that one.
(Photo: Nicole Disser)
If you enter the cordoned-off projection room at LA-based artist Alison O’Daniel‘s newly-opened exhibition, Room Tone at just the right moment (anytime between now and May 8, when the show is on view at Knockdown Center), you’ll bump right into the summer of 1980, when a packed house at one of San Francisco’s weirdest “social experiments” known as the Deaf Club, had gathered for the venue’s very last punk show. The legendary punk club, which had originally functioned as a social club for the deaf since it was founded in the 1930s, came about when the building’s owners decided to rent out some extra space. The deaf social remained while the place became a raucous DIY show space by night, drawing artists, musicians, and underground types like John Waters.
In O’Daniel’s film, we see some of the deaf people playing card games, unperturbed as the floors rattle and shake around them, and others wandering through the punk show as if in a dream, continuing to engage in their intimate sign conversations, while the wild noise around them proves to have little power in disrupting their connection. On the flip side, the punk show goes on, too– the presence of the Deaf Club members has no effect on the punk catharsis. I imagined a giant venn diagram– the small sliver in the center being the smidgen of experience that the deaf and hearing people shared in this scene, and the almost whole worlds that remained intact outside where the circles met. As a hearing impaired person, O’Daniel can jump back-and-forth between these two separate circles of experience, just one perspective that makes Room Tone so profoundly brain shifting.
(Image via Aviv/ Facebook)
T-Rextasy, Band Practice, Doubles
Friday January 8, 8 pm at Aviv: $7
Picture a femme Parquet Courts fronted by Ellen Page all hopped up on candy and you’re sort of getting at what T-Rextasy are all about. Their sound defies what might first be taken for twee, instead invoking an array of complexity of sweet, sassy, sour, sad, and snappy feelings delivered in a way that’s interchangeably manic, then replete with earnest babbling from the front, supported by plucky punk guitars and primitive, clap-clap drums from the rear.
(Via Escape-Ism / Bandcamp)
This week, as I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear, there are plenty of shows worth blowing your ears out for. Our picks include a brand new project from a longtime blues punk devotee, The Dark Prince of Garage, and sugar-sweet disco that’s not afraid to hit sour notes. All that and more below this here line.
This week, the benefits continue for the Silent Barn– and c’mon, you wanna see those bands play anyway, right? Also on the docket: a still-warbling legend from the actual ’80s and A Place to Bury Strangers is back from the road.
It’s that time of the week again. Scrambling to see what’s happening this weekend? Well, we don’t blame you for allowing yourself to check out of existence for the majority of the work week — attention spans are getting shorter and shorter as we hurtle toward holiday. Just kidding, we don’t get months off work to enjoy what little nice weather we’re blessed with each year, this isn’t freaking Europe. But at least you can pretend like something as blissful is on the horizon. We need something to keep us going and frequently lying to yourself works just as well as actual hope, for a brief time anyway. But you know what else helps to keep this awful world seem less so? live musical acts. So consider our weekly offerings after the jump.