Visually, the out of control fog machine created an effect reminiscent of the kind of off-grey smoke that might fill your kitchen after you burn your toast charcoal black.

Additionally, it made me think of the cars of certain friends and coworkers who can’t go ten minutes without taking a rip off their “Mango” JUUL. Yeah. It’s hard to get into the proper mystical indie rock headspace one would associate with Wye Oak when the fog machine somehow made the entire Englert smell like fruity vape clouds.

Why bring up the whole fog machine fiasco?

Well, in my opinion, it’s symbolic of the problems that came with Wye Oak’s Mission Creek performance as whole. Before continuing on that point, I will take a moment to say that I hold Wye Oak in high esteem.

It firmly remains my opinion that they’re one of the best, most inventive indie rock bands of the 2010s. I still stand by everything I said in my preview for their performance.

But their show at the Englert Friday night was… disappointing.

And it’s not for lack of putting in a good performance on Wye Oak’s part; Jenn Wasner was in full, lovely voice, as usual, and the backing artists brought the kind of roaring sounds any fan would expect from the group.

So what went wrong?

Well, like the cranked-up-to-11 fog machine, a heavy hand on the technical side of things spoiled what should have been an exhilarating performance.

On record, Wye Oak is a band noted for their dramatic dynamics and bold foregrounding of Wasner’s distinctive contralto vocals; on stage at the Englert Friday Night, a muddy mix obscured these dynamics.

My guess is that the stage technicians cranked up the levels to accommodate subdued opening act Margaret Glaspy, and then neglected to adjust them downward for the much louder, more aggressive Wye Oak, because their sound was redlined beyond all recognition.

Where the line differentiating quiet and loud should have been clear and Wasner’s vocals brought to the forefront for the audience to enjoy, each element in the mix was made so equally, blaringly loud it was hard to discern which was which.

Most disappointingly, Wasner’s voice — and the thoughtful, emotive lyrics she sang — were completely buried in the mix.

Save for the number of songs they played whose lyrics I knew by heart — personal favorites like “Civilian,” “Spiral” and “Holy Holy” — I often could not tell what she was singing at all.

Let me be clear: I’m a dear fan of this band.

Again, the fault didn’t lie in their songs or performance. I want to stress my disappointment stems from the fact that they were done a disservice by the acoustics and mixing that were in place when they took the stage, because poor production can and will spoil the most talented of acts.

It’s hard to say what went wrong and why given that the Englert has produced excellent rock shows before and that Wye Oak has performed them.

Whatever the cause, a dynamic band like Wye Oak ultimately deserves better than a mix that flattens their subtle quiet moments and roaring highs alike into a monolith drone.

And a gifted singer like Wasner absolutely deserves better than a production that buries her vocals into oblivion.

Unfortunately, however, that’s the mix that they — and the audience — got Friday night. Wye Oak remains, indubitably, a talented act. Let’s just hope the next time they come to Iowa City, they’ll be treated to a level-handed mix that will let these talents shine.

The post Mission Creek Festival: Wye Oak @ The Englert Theatre 4/6/18 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Of course my friend was joking. Or was he? Collidescope guitarist Madi — identified by first name only on Facebook and Bandcamp; she’s like Prince, apparently — practically invited the comparison, with her impressively fist-sized twin braid buns and flowing white chemise, but let’s pretend for a moment that her penchant for Alderaanian fashion goes beyond mere imitation.

I mean, why not? If any Iowa City act is currently harboring a Jedi space princess among their ranks, it’d have to be Collidescope.

The vastness of space and the mysteries of the intergalactic are their chief aesthetic and thematic obsessions; heck, even their Mission Creek promo identifies them as aliens shipwrecked on planet Earth. After seeing them at the Yacht Club Thursday night, I’ll believe it.

Collidescope didn’t perform songs last night so much as they employed sound and light to draw their audience out of this world and into theirs.

The atmosphere at the Yacht Club itself became something like a sensory deprivation chamber when the duo stepped on stage. The entire venue, save for the stage itself, was plunged into near total darkness, while the bone-shaking drone the group chose to open the performance with drowned all other sounds into imperceptibility.

And what did that leave the audience to experience?

Just the duo itself and their exquisite siren’s song of an opening track. There were no drums, and I’m not sure there were any lyrics, just Madi’s down-tuned electric drones accompanied by vocalist’s Hadiza Sa-Aadu’s borderline-angelic, wordless, single note song.

Single note? No drums? Exquisite?

I get why you might be skeptical at this point, and were I recounting the concert to you as a friend I’d be tempted to throw up my hands and say you had to be there, maaaan.

Being an author tasked with reviewing the show in a more formal capacity, however, I’ll do my best to convey why it was such a special moment.

Standing in the Yacht Club before the stage, where it was so dark I couldn’t see my own hands and the music was so loud I couldn’t hear my own thoughts?

In those conditions, that one note song became the entirety of my sensory experience. Collidescope took a single drawn-out note and, for the few minutes Hadiza sung it and Madi played it, they turned it into an entire universe for the audience to immerse themselves in.

Believe me yet?

If not, I’ll reiterate: you had to be there, man. Some bands are just best experienced live, and Collidescope is one of them. With this band, it’s not about hearing the songs so much as feeling them.

Listen to them on Bandcamp or Soundcloud all you want — they deserve the support — but until you see them in person and feel their monolithic, oceanic drones shake you down to your bones, you haven’t experienced the band to the fullest. Trust me on this.

So if the rumors of Collidescope’s intergalactic origins are true, let’s just hope they chose to stick around Iowa City for a while. They may not be of this world, but we’re all the richer for it when they’re so incredibly gifted at pulling us into theirs.

The post Mission Creek Festival: Collidescope @ The Yacht Club 4/6/18 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Although you’ll typically find them called “indie rock” or “indie folk,” the truth is that Wye Oak is a tough band to pigeonhole owing to their immense stylistic flexibility.

While the Baltimore-based duo — composed of vocalist Jenn Wasner and instrumentalist Andy Stack — might stick to straightforward and introspective folk on some tracks, others find them cranking out roaring shoegaze or taking on elliptical indie dance.

Regardless of what sounds they choose to explore, it’s a given that this band is one that will break new musical ground with each new album.

That’s not to say that Wye Oak lacks an instantly recognizable “trademark sound,” however. They do, but it doesn’t lie with their genre or instrumentation. Instead, the one constant with the band’s music is their earnest and heartfelt lyrics and the passion with which Wasner — a distinct, highly emotive vocalist — sings them.

Isolation, longing, and spiritual desperation are foremost among the topics Wye Oak’s music addresses. Wasner’s voice — throaty, weary and lived-in — lends effortless authenticity to these heavy themes. When she tells us “I don’t need another friend / when most of them / I can barely keep up with them,” as she does on the their 2011 breakthrough Civilian, her strained tones make it easy to feel as though the admission comes from personal experience.

Wasner is wholly convincing the role of lovesick siren, but don’t be mistaken: befitting their stylistic diversity, Wye Oak are also capable of tackling moods far beyond simple melancholia. Swirling psychedelia, fiery romance, and unveiled sensuality are all in play.

There is, too, a recurring sense of religious awe, nakedly expressed in a way that is unusual for an indie rock band. On Civilian and its sister EP My Neighbor / My Creator, Wye Oak crafts a primordial-feeling world where encounters with spirits, rituals and all powerful creators are an ordinary part of day to day emotional life.

The effect is not to proselytize but to create a sense of wonderment any listener can tap into, regardless of their beliefs. Wasner might sing openly of holiness, but she’s also happy to leave its source open to interpretation. Consider these songs hymns for the “spiritual but not religious” crowd.

Wye Oak’s April 6th performance at the Englert Theatre will coincide with the release date of their most recent album, The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs, giving Iowa City concert-goers a unique first chance at hearing the new songs live.

If the title track, linked above, is anything to go by, the new album will continue the band’s streak of inventive, elaborate rock; skronky guitar combines with multi-tracked vocals and big, almost stadium-worthy choruses to create an ambitious, crowd-pleasing experience uncommon to indie rock in 2018.

The question remains — will the rest of the new tracks stack up? No promises, except for this: catch them at Englert this Friday, and you’ll be one of the first to find out if Wye Oak’s track record as one of the most exciting bands in contemporary indie rock holds up. It’s an opportunity that makes this concert rank among Mission Creek’s can’t-miss performances.

The post Mission Creek Festival Promo: Wye Oak @ The Englert Theatre appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Simply put, while other ’90s groups may be better remembered, few acts still encapsulate the period’s spirit of ambitious amateurism like these guys do.

What do I mean by ambitious amateurism, exactly? Let me explain. While the Boise, Idaho based group may have first got together back in 1992, they didn’t hit their stride until releasing their third and fourth LPs toward the end of the decade.

Critically acclaimed, 1997’s Perfect From Now On and 1999’s Keep It Like A Secret were the records that put the group on the national radar.

These were heady years for alternative rock, of course — years when groundbreaking releases like Radiohead’s OK Computer, the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, and Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating In Space raised the artistic stakes for alternative rock higher than they’d been in nearly a decade.

For the first time, musically elaborate and thematically lofty albums had become the genre’s norm.

This marked a big change from the early 90s’ emphasis on unpretentious, nakedly emotional hard rock. Built to Spill, however, had yet to abandon these sounds.

They were (and are) a band that obviously emerged in the northwest during the height of the grunge explosion — their punk-friendly, primitive musical aesthetic and DIY mentality remained intact well past grunge’s expiration date.

That didn’t keep Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like A Secret from meeting the challenging artistic demands of the second half of the decade, however.

How did Built to Spill do it? The band didn’t adopt a Radiohead-style prog rock sound for these records. They kept their DIY mentality — but adapted it to tackle the Big, Serious Themes that became in vogue.

Over unpolished, squealing guitar lines worthy of Dinosaur Jr, deadpan frontman Doug Martsch takes to the mike to question religion, muse about philosophy, and idly wonder what life is like on other planets.

But cloaked in these grandiose themes are the more down-to-earth topics that ordinary people actually grapple with day to

day: relationships, hurt feelings, the struggle to remain optimistic in the face of an uncertain future.

Where some of their contemporaries (think Modest Mouse) might have eventually gone on to adopt a big budget production suited to the big topics their lyrics tackle, Built to Spill has stubbornly refused to stray from their indie-punk roots, and that remains their biggest strength.

The wide scope of Martsch’s lyrics makes these so-called small things feel huge, while their modest sound suggests even that even the most humble every-man is worthy of questioning the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Ambitious amateurism — it’s a beautiful thing, and after 20 years it’s still what Built to Spill does best. Here’s hoping the wise-ass underdog spirit that powered their best records is on full display at the Englert this April.

Check out the Mission Creek Festival lineup here.

The post Mission Creek Festival Promo: Built to Spill appeared first on KRUI Radio.

It’s one thing to sing the praises of an act everyone, seemingly, can agree on. What new is there to say about Radiohead, for instance? Would I be breaking new ground by writing a column about how the Talking Heads were brilliant and ahead of their time, or by observing that Kendrick Lamar is one of the most vital rappers working today? Hardly.

No, what I’m interested in exploring with this column is music that has been forgotten. Some of the acts I’ll feature were unfairly maligned in their own time, while others were outright ignored or simply misunderstood. What they all share is their worthiness of a second chance. Think of them as best-kept secrets or hidden gems.

The American shoegaze scene of the late 80s and early 90s definitely falls under the category of misunderstood.

When most nineties rock fans think of shoegaze, they probably think of bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, or Slowdive — drowsy, downtempo, intensely introspective acts invested in capturing moods of soft-focus, druggy sensuality.

The fact that these acts all originated in Ireland and the United Kingdom is no coincidence. Whereas Americans associate the phrase “90s alternative rock” with the grime and gloom of grunge, the rock zeitgeist across the pond was one of danceable, extroverted, sunshine-drenched poppy genres like Britpop or the Madchester scene.

Accessibility was by-word of the day. Brit-rock titans like Blur and Oasis raced up the charts by drawing on the warmth and melodicism of sixties groups like the Beatles or the Kinks.

Meanwhile, more niche acts like the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Primal Scream brought rich, beat-heavy jams to raves across the country.

The insularity and introversion of British shoegaze was an intention backlash against their country’s mainstream. But when the shoegaze sound was exported to America, it arrived unattached from the cultural context that originally prompted its gloomy moods.

The result? American indie bands gave shoegaze an entirely new image. Where the sound once was tightly linked with introversion, it was now attached to summery, outward looking songs with a focus on celebrating youth.

DC-based act Velocity Girl‘s 1991 single “My Forgotten Favorite” lends its name to this column because it’s so utterly appropriate: a pitch perfect slice of indie pop unfairly resigned to obscurity, a literal forgotten favorite. It’s also one of the high water marks of the American shoegaze scene.

Could anything be more different — and yet so similar — to the Slowdive track I shared above? The hazy productive and dreamy, high pitched female vocals are there, but the outlook is entirely different.

“Machine Gun” is stoned to near-oblivion. The only mind-altering substance clearly involved in the production of “My Forgotten Favorite,” meanwhile, is pure infatuation. As vocalist Sarah Shannon insists that “you’re the only one who makes me feel this way” over jangly semi-electric guitars, we want to believe her.

Head on up the east coast to Boston and you’ll find the Swirlies, a group that melds shoegaze’s chugging and densely produced guitar sounds with the restless noisiness of Massachusetts contemporaries like Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr.

I love this group for their spontaneity. Each track on their debut, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, feels like a first cut, full of unembellished creative energy.

Composed entirely of MIT students, the Swirlies embody the term ‘college rock’ in the most relatable way. Their lyrics are littered with sophomoric philosophical ideas and engineering facts half-remembered for past exams, the stuff of late night conversations with classmates who are just as stressed out as you are. “Pancake” is a song about going to class that sounds like going to class, a song for dodging the 12:20 crowds on Clinton St with headphones on while mentally juggling your to-do list for the day.

Many other acts — Black Tambourine and Lilys are highlights — hem closer to the original shoegaze sound while still retaining a heightened sense of melody over their British forebears.

On “Black Car,” Black Tambourine takes My Bloody Valentine’s reverb drenched production but brings the drums higher in the mix. The result hearkens back to noisier, more aggressive shoegaze progenitors like The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Beyond the artists featured in this article, dozens — maybe hundreds — of others exist for the intrepid fan to explore.

Unmoored from the cultural context that gave British shoegaze its introverted raison d’être and distinctly out of place in American alternative rock’s grungy mainstream, American shoegaze was in its own time the transatlantic red headed stepchild of the nineties indie rock scene.

In 2018, however, the scene remains one of the richest uncovered veins of creative, intelligent indie rock for any fan of 90s music to mine.

The post My Forgotten Favorite: American Shoegaze appeared first on KRUI Radio.

1960s psychedelia and ’70s punk rock were diametrically opposed in their own time. Nowadays, however, they coexist as the dual strands in contemporary indie and alternative rock’s DNA.

Loud, aggressive, occasionally nihilistic artists like Pixies, Nirvana, and Sonic Youth clearly belong in the punk tradition, and comprised American alternative music’s mainstream in the 80s and early 90s.

But with the decline of grunge in the mid 90s, the lush sounds and inventive spirit of Brian Wilson and the Beatles recaptured indie rock’s imagination and have remained primary influences ever since.

Some psychedelia-influenced acts like Animal Collective, Tame Impala, and the Flaming Lips follow in the footsteps of these artists by relentlessly experimenting with the possibilities of elaborately produced and highly melodic rock music.

Others, however, are content with simply recreating the decades’ old sounds of their idols.

Portland-based group Blitzen Trapper belongs squarely in the latter category.

For Blitzen Trapper, technology might have changed since the 1960s but the aesthetics and song forms of the British Invasion remain timeless. Listening to albums like Wild Mountain Nation, Furr, and their latest release, Wild and Reckless, I occasionally feel that the band’s highest ambition is to imagine what Abbey Road would have sounded like if the Beatles had recorded their songs to a CD-ROM instead of a four-track cassette.

All of the elements are here: gangly melodies, sunshine-filled harmonies, and shimmering acoustic guitars take centerstage on album after album.

Eric Earley, like so many Beatlemaniacs-turned-frontmen before him, gamely mimics John Lennon’s iconic vocals, with a voice ranges from a nasal sneer on tracks like “Gold for Bread” to a reedy falsetto on “Furr.”

The lyrics are mostly tall-tales told in the first person. Their most popular single, “Furr,” is a wordy coming-of-age tale told by way of an allegory about running away from home to join a wolf pack, while Wild and Reckless is a far-flung concept album about a Hollywood drug dealer-turned-cop-turned drug dealer again.

“That longing for escape, that pure juvenile psychedelia we possessed as kids laying in summer grass gazing up at the clouds in the sky seeing shapes in them,” Earley writes, is the feeling he strives to capture in his music.

In other words, experimentation has its place, but so, too, does music that strives to soothe nostalgia for a bygone time. If punk rock’s imperative is to “make it new,” Blitzen Trapper is happy to leave this task to other bands. For them and their fans, it’s more than enough to try and recapture the sounds of an era they otherwise could never experience firsthand.

The band’s performance at the Mill will be their 3nd visit to Iowa City in three years, following a previous 2016 show at the venue. The concert is slated to begin at 8:00 PM, with Nashville singer-songwriter Lilly Hiatt performing as the opening act.

Performance Preview is a column spotlighting the best and most notable acts coming soon to Iowa City.

The post Performance Preview: Blitzen Trapper @ The Mill, November 17th appeared first on KRUI Radio.

A word that gets thrown around a lot when describing the sound of Massachusetts-based emo revival group The Hotelier is “sincere.”

Just listen to “An Introduction To The Album” off their 2014 record Home, Like Noplace Is There and you’ll be quick to see why. Every element off of the song is desperate to express raw emotion. There’s Christian Holden’s half-breaking, half-screaming voice; the fragile keyboards; the woah-oh backing vocals that sound like they were cribbed from an early Arcade Fire album.

And then there’s the lyrics.

“So fragile are bodies, so concave, work in self-destructive ways,” Holden moans. “I had the chance to construct something beautiful and I choked.”

Teenage emotion, in all of its gangly and uncomely urgency, is Holden’s primary subject. And given that he was still in high school when the band put out its first record (2011’s It Never Goes Out) he reports it with all the gritty, unpretentious authenticity that can only come from the first-person experience.

This sincerity and authenticity have made The Hotelier one of the hottest bands of the emo revival. That being said, it also limits their appeal to listeners who don’t empathize with emo’s open-hearted emotional palette.

Some lines, like “I would smile, but it would be meaningless / and I wouldn’t want it to be meaningless” off 2016’s Goodness, seem more likely to provoke eye-rolls than to tug at the heartstrings.

These moments of unfocused angst seem unsympathetic and uninspired, true. But when Holden takes concrete examples of real-world anguish as his subject, the intensity of the music hits the mark.

“I called in sick from your funeral,” he sings on “Your Deep Rest,” an account of a friend’s suicide, “because the sight of your body made me uncomfortable.” On “Among The Wildflowers,” an impressionistic account of self-harm in the wake of abuse, he sighs “you’re killing the self to protect it from harm.”

The plainspoken, self-conscious nature of lyrics like these is instantly recognizable to anyone who has been forced to endure tragedy or abuse at an early age. At their best, The Hotelier doesn’t imitate teenage feelings, they embody them. On songs like these, Holden captures how it feels to try to understand life’s most painful moments before you’re even old enough to drive.

It’s true that The Hotelier may not be suitable for everyone or every mood. But for listeners who are willing to look past the band’s more juvenile moments, they reward with inventive, heart-on-sleeve pop-punk that is often genuinely heart-rending in its impact.

The show is scheduled for 6:30 PM; seating begins at 6:00. Indie-pop quartet Alex Napping and pop-punk group Oso Oso are the opening acts.

Performance Preview is a new column spotlighting the best and most notable acts coming soon to Iowa City.

The post Performance Preview: The Hotelier @ Gabe’s, November 14th appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Who: Noname
Where: The Englert Theater
When: November 18 @ 8:00 pm
Price: $22 – $25 per ticket; General Admission
Genre: Hip-hop, poetry, Spoken Word

If I had to sum up the work of rising Chicago hip-hop star Noname in one word, that word would be “bittersweet.” Case in point: her stellar 2016 debut mixtape, Telefone.

Written after the deaths of her grandmother and mentor, poet Brother Mike, “Telefone” is a portrait of immense grief but it is also a showcase for Noname’s vibrant lyrical imagination. Filled with small details, character sketches and vignettes, each track on the record feels like a world unto itself.

Consider the child caught sneaking a $20 bill from his mom’s purse in “Diddy Bop,” the crowded coffee shop in “Reality Check,” or the “casanova with a catalog of dinner dates” in “All I Need.” These moments show off Noname’s eye for key details, with the effect of creating vividly real, tangible, and fleshed-out scenes for listeners to step into. Noname’s Chicago is nothing if not complicated, a city of carefree summers spent “eating ice cream on the front porch” but also of “badges and pistols rejoicing in the night” as well.

On display, too, is Noname’s ability to ground her personal experience in the larger world around her. In verse after verse, she ties her own anguish to the present political moment and to the broader history of the black experience in the United States.

One standout moment is the verse “Reality Check” where she imagines her grandmother’s ghost appearing to provide some blunt perspective on the anxiety and uncertainty that Noname endures as a young artist: “You know they whipped us n***** / Why you afraid to rap?” Incisive, plainspoken moments like these infuse the record. Noname’s prescient political and historical insight from the heartrending emotional core of her work.

Noname’s poignant verses are backed up by a lush, mellow production from Chicago peers Saba and Cam O’Bi. The pair is known for their work with Chance the Rapper. Like “Acid Rap” and “Coloring Book,” “Telefone’s” sound is steeped in IDM and Motown influences alike. Here, warm synths and skittering beats combine with jazz piano and sampled barbershop vocals to create a mood that manages to be nostalgic without ever feeling dated or derivative.

Her live band, which includes producer Phoelix on bass and vocalist/composer Akenya Seymour on the keyboard, tends to more strongly capture the soul and jazz elements of her sound. Shimmering Rhodes piano, call and response vocals, and ultra-clean electric guitar are all prominent. Their recent appearance on NPR Tiny Desk Concert, featuring a medley of “Reality Check”, “Casket Pretty”, and “Bye Bye Baby”, highlights the live band’s subtly improvisational interplay: you can watch it here.

Noname’s Englert performance will be her second in Iowa City following an appearance at the IMU Ballroom in support of the Black History Month Talent Show last February. Arima Ederra, a Los Angeles-based alternative singer-songwriter, will be the opening act.

Performance Preview is a new column spotlighting the best and most notable acts coming soon to Iowa City.

The post Performance Preview: Noname @ Englert Theater, November 18 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

By all appearances, Collins’ show — one of the very last appearing on the schedule of Witching Hour — shouldn’t have felt as big as it did. Armed with only one backing musician, one synthesizer, and the forty or so patrons watching in the Mill, the show seemed destined to be a modest affair.

Nonetheless, Collins’ energy was quick to infect everyone in attendance. At 11:12, he literally leaped onto stage and remained in frenetic motion until the show was over.

The hundreds of blurry pictures that I had to take of Collins before capturing one clear enough to share is as good a testament as any to his hummingbird-like restlessness. From line to line, Collins buzzed from end of the stage to the next, all the while leaning into the crowd as if he was trying to share a secret with us.

It was this – his outsized personality, his extrovert’s eagerness to communicate with the crowd – that made the show feel like a much bigger event than I had expected it to be.

Collins performed as if he were before an audience of hundreds. The dark and narrow confines of the Mill faded away before the radiant self-confidence that Collins evinced on stage.

Neither did the sparse backing arrangement turn out to be a problem. The sounds that came out of that lone synthesizer – big and dirty synths, heavy organ samples, 80s honky-tonk keyboards – had a monolithic simplicity that only added momentum to the performance.

Any gaps that were in the arrangement were filled by the flexibility of Collins’ style. A fluid, nimble rapper with a flow often described as melodic, Collins switched up the performance by sneaking his offhand, oddball observations about the audience and the room in between the rhymes.

During one breathless moment between tracks, Collins took a pause to boast. “This is my job.” Beaming, he then dove into a new unnamed track with the same cool, accomplished assurance that had carried him through the rest of the show. “Can you believe I’m at work right now?” If he ever felt like he was, he never it let it show.

Later, he offered the audience a question. “So what have we learned tonight? Do you, take care of other people…” He began to answer, until a drunken audience member interjected. “And fuck Donald Trump!”

“And fuck Donald Trump,” Collins echoed with a laugh. “Do you, and fuck everyone else.” The politics might be up for debate, but by the time the show came to an end, Kweku Collins’ message of total self-assurance felt unassailable.

The post Witching Hour: Kweku Collins @ The Mill 10/21/2017 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I mention this little detail because it seems to sum up his entire stage persona.

Philip Rabalais, you see, seems entirely one of us when he first steps on stage, just another skinny 20-something guy in horn-rimmed glasses and a size-too-large flannel shirt, someone you could easily imagine passing by on a Monday morning as you head to class.

This is unsurprising, considering that he’s no touring musician but an Iowa City local, a grad student in the University of Iowa’s Cinematic Arts program.

His introverted stage presence was not helped by the frankly sedate atmosphere that filled the Mill at the time he came on stage, leading me to have low expectations for the show ahead.

From the moment he hooked up his laptop to the Mill’s omnipresent audio system, however, Rabalais became something entirely different. Seemingly out of nowhere, the kid who had sheepishly mumbled “hello, I’m Philip” into the microphone flooded the Mill with bass and beats so infectious that half of the audience instantly fled their tables for the dance floor.

Phillip Rabalais had become a DJ, with all the low-brow, beat-heavy, Saturday night sensation-seeking sensuality that the term rightfully implies. With that baggy hipster flannel off of his back and thrown to the floor, the transformation was complete.

Setlists are useless when describing the flow of Rabalais’ performance. His songs had no distinct beginning or end; rather, melodic elements dropped in and out of the mix as the beat shifted up and down tempo according to Rabalais’ whims.

At times, I felt that he was composing new tracks on the fly, stitching new beats together from the wealth of samples presumably stored on the Macbook he that had hauled on stage.

His sound itself was heavily dominated by looped vocal samples. Rabalais wove a tapestry of male and female voices that were so heavily distorted that it was hard to tell if they were human or if they had been computer generated.

At other times, flutes, synths and sax entered the mix, hinting at the forms of more conventional dance genres but never quite conforming to them. The inhuman distortions of Blank Banshee and similar vaporwave artists are perhaps the most obvious mainstream touchstone for his sound.

The key difference between these artists and Rabalais, of course, is that all the ironic trappings of the internet faded away as he performed live and in person.

With all of the tables trembling and the dance floor full, the kid on the stage and the surreal, warped and modified sounds coming out of his laptop had somehow captured the schism between reality and possibility that gets crossed after a few drinks on a weekend night.

And as the show finally drew to a close, it was clear that Philip Rabalais himself – the shy grad student turned explosive club DJ – embodied that possibility better than anyone else in the room.

The post Witching Hour: Philip Rabalais @ The Mill 10/21/2017 appeared first on KRUI Radio.