FEaST is an Iowa City staple, highlighting avant-garde, rare, extreme, and esoteric music. This year though, the festival holds special significance. For the past eight years, Chris Wiersema had functioned as the founder, producer, and overall creative visionary of Feed Me Weird Things, the concert series that puts on the festival and focuses on bringing unusual music to Iowa City venues. FEaST serves as its keynote event. Sadly, this past March we lost Chris, but he left behind a nearly fully booked FEaST festival as one last gift to all of us.
Through the hard work of the Feed Me Weird Things team, the Iowa City community, and friends, this year’s FEaST serves to commemorate and honor the life and legacy of Chris Wiersema, and a chance for Iowa City to come together to celebrate all things weird.
The third annual FEaST will take place from October 30th to November 2nd at The James Theater, with all shows starting at 7:30 PM. Eight acts will perform over the course of the four days: Ava Mendonza and Friend on Wednesday, Zeena Parkins and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe on Thursday, Wolf Eyes and Maria Chavez on Friday, and finally Sarah Davachi and Circuit Des Yeux on Saturday. Four nights of deep listening to some of the most enigmatic sounds collected.
Friend
Jon Mueller’s work holds a very special place for me. He was the first musician I ever wrote about when I was doing a review for KRUI of a Feed Me Weirds Things show, at Trumpet Blossom Cafe in Iowa City with him and Bitchin Bajas. In many ways his performance lingers with me. He sat behind and obstructed by an array of gongs, alternating in the way he pummeled them and let them ring. It gave a feeling of immense dread, but not necessarily in a visions of doom type of way. It was more percolating in essence, like you were being haunted by ghosts, but they were all people still alive, just obscured in the rolling haze making you feel invisible to them. Yet still you stand there mesmerized by the strangeness of the scene. All of it rolling in on sticks foaming up the brassy drone.
Jon Mueller makes his return from a forgotten Wisconsin town as a friend of Feed Me Weird Things and Iowa City. He’s performing with Andrew Fitzpatrick, together as Friend. The two of them will be the first performance of this year’s FEaST festival, opening the Wednesday night show. Perhaps there’s no better artist to set the blissfully abnormal and often eerie tone of Feed Me Weird Things.
-John Glab, Editor-In-Chief
Ava Mendoza
Ava Mendonza is a Brooklyn based singer, songwriter, and guitarist. She is the leader of rock band Unnatural Ways and regularly collaborates with other artists in addition to her solo endeavors. She is best known for her solo guitar and voice performances.
Her latest album, The Circular Train, releases on November 15th. With the album, Mendoza says, “I had the honor of spending several years as the nightly entertainer onboard The Circular Train. Over this time I wrote, arranged, and honed these songs through routine concerts.” Said to be her most personal album yet, The Circular Train consists only of avant-rock, single tracked guitar playing and vocals. The record features a cover of “Irene, Goodnight” popularized by Lead Belly.
-Amanda Moy, Music Staff
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe is a longtime multidisciplinary musical artist with a long, colorful history. He cut his teeth in a bevy of bands scattered across the United States, most famous of the bunch being 2000s art rockers TV On The Radio, before settling into an equally rewarding solo career in progressive electronic and ambient soundscapes. His music is a conceptual left turn, yet one executed with grace, as Lowe is regarded as a respected figure in his field. You may have encountered some of his most recent work soundtracking Candyman, Grasshopper Republic, and Power. Regardless of your point of entry, Lowe’s contemplative pastoral palettes are sure to transport you to another plane.
-Evan Raefield, Training Director
Zeena Parkins
Zeena Parkins is a New York based composer and multi-instrumentalist, best known for her custom electric harps. Her current electric harp is the third iteration of a design originally created for her work with experimental rock group Skeleton Crew, with the components of it fabricated by sound artist Douglas Henderson. She has also performed on standard harps, piano, and accordion. Her sound has been described as blending real and imagined instruments, along with exploring their boundaries and movement.
Parkins is a professor in the music department and holds the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition at Mills College. She has collaborated and performed with a wide range of artists, including Yoko Ono, Björk, and Courtney Love’s band Hole. She has also organized with numerous dance companies, choreographers, and filmmakers. In addition, she has released fifteen albums, six of which are solo harp records.
-Amanda Moy, Music Staff
Maria Chávez
Relying on the modification of vinyl records by thoughtfully breaking them apart, using multiple needles to play different sections of a record simultaneously, and daringly introducing forward thinking methods of sculpting sound using a mixer and a turntable, Maria Chávez will make you rethink the concept of turntablism at this year’s FEaST.
Born in Peru, she moved to the United States where it was found that her ears were full of liquid. Maria recalls fondly her first memory: after her ear draining procedure, she was able to hear for the first time. Since then, sound has been primordially present in her life, and later in her teenage years she picked up DJing. Her practice then evolved into eclectic and avant-garde techniques of turntablism which originated for her as a counterpoint to the male dominated DJ culture. Nowadays though she can also be seen DJing a tasteful selection of house music with ease in some off-shoot chances.
Maria’s practice has led her to perform and be involved in academia all over the globe, including London, Houston, Valencia, New York City, and now Iowa City for FEaST. Maria Chávez’s performance; whether it be presenting her out of the box techniques of turntablism, a tasteful selection of house music, or a delightful combination of both; is sure not to be missed.
-Andrés Mora Mata, Music Director
Wolf Eyes
Wolf Eyes is an experimental group boasting the noisy synthesis of Nate Young and Aaron Dilloway. Since the group’s inception in 1996, as the solo project of Young in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the band has toyed with everything from sound collage to hard dance beats. Despite the range of sounds, each features the dense texturing and sporadic use of sound effects that the group is known for.
One of their newer albums, Dreams in Splattered Lines, contains a predictably wide range of musical stylings, including many electronic free improvisation sessions. The sample work on this project shows the band at their absolute best, featuring thumping drumbeats and static, misty chord progressions, complete with haunting, distorted vocals. If you want to feel as if a blanket of haze is wrapping around you on a cold night, let this feeling consume you, and make sure not to miss Wolf Eyes’ performance at FEaST.
-Casper Bakker, Editorial Staff
Circuit des Yeux
Since 2007, Chicago singer-songwriter Haley Fohr has been releasing music under the stage name Circuit des Yeux. Since then, she has released seven albums, including ones under Drag City and Matador, and collaborated with people like Claire Rousay. Her compositions are primarily structured around her immense vocal range and fluttering guitar playing. Her instrumentation often has a varied chamber like halo feel to it, ruminating from the ground up until it surrounds you in its columns. Fohr’s voice then croons over these sounds, wavering immensely from reverberating lows, to searing atmospheric highs. Any room that she enters floods in a uniform, unescapable, drowning sound.
-John Glab, Editor-In-Chief
Sarah Davachi
The work of Sarah Davachi can be described as an eerie and fanciful approach to minimalistic synthesizer music. Though she is native to Canada, she boasts many international projects commissioned by the likes of the London Contemporary Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Radio France, and the Canadian International Organ Competition. Her work has also been featured at The Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Museum, and Grace Cathedral. She has held residency with the Banff Centre for the Arts, EMPAC, the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, the National Music Centre, and the Swiss Museum & Center for Electronic Music Instruments. She earned a master’s degree in electronic music and recording media from Mills College in Oakland, California but is currently up for a doctoral position in musicology at UCLA. This of course is not the full extent of her accomplishments by any means, as she is a very experienced composer of great acclaim.
Her pieces are structured around classical piano, from her experience as a trained pianist and organist, along with chamber choir music. Davachi has composed in both electronic and acoustic mediums, often combining the two. Her main instrumentations consist of pipe organs, electronic synthesizers, and at times brass and string instruments. In her own words, her sound is, “an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions of the familiar and distant.”
Davachi’s style employs the listener to engage in more active and focused listening. Her latest album The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir, is an hour and a half of very dark and extensive tones, conveyed in intense emotion, with interjections of elongated peaceful sounds across its runtime. The seven compositions on the album are a reflective suite on human memory and fondness. The album touches on the Greek myth of Orpheus, with it also “an observance of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage; the ways that we commune, memorialize, and carry symbols back into the world beyond representation.”
-Lee Nienhaus, Editorial Staff
Tickets and passes for FEaST by Feed Me Weird Things are available for purchase now and at the door of The James Theater. Enjoy all things weird.
Cover image via Anna Kritz