Their first meeting was in January of 2025, and they instantly got to work. They released their debut single 6 months later. Now they have started doing shows and testing their newer songs in live audiences. 

For their show at the James Theater, there will be a 10$ entry fee. To keep up with what the band is doing, you can follow them on Instagram under the username @bluffstreetband. You can also find them on Spotify or Apple Music.

The post ‘Bluff Street: From the Vault’ preview appeared first on KRUI Radio.

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

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Hirway and Youngs were quick to show their personalities and steal our hearts. They were funny, charismatic, and overall charming. Youngs even called us their friends. They were excited for their “extensive three day tour of the Midwest.”

The two clearly shared a meaningful bond. Hirway acknowledged Youngs’s exceptional career and Youngs called “Rishi” a “notable podcaster and cool guy.” It was impossible not to smile and laugh with the joyous duo. To start the show off, they detailed lovable stories from how they almost met, how they did meet, Hirway’s marriage, Youngs’ teenage years, and other fun snippets from their careers.

Jenny has just concluded her podcast “Buffering The Vampire Slayer,” and she wrote an original song based on each episode. The singers performed a delightfully chilling song called Hush. Their smooth voices melted together perfectly and I had goosebumps the entire time.  This was the first song they wrote together but definitely not the last.

The artists preceded each song with some background information. The individual pieces meshed together to create a beautiful and calming set. A couple songs including Memory Palace and Between There and Here brought tears to my eyes. Just when I thought they couldn’t top themselves, Youngs performed arguably my favorite song from the show, Next Time Around.

An hour and a half of the friends’ comedic and lovable dynamic was not nearly enough. It was a joyride to be on. Their songs were heart wrenching, and then their whimsical friendship had the whole audience laughing.

The artists shared personal details that furthered our love for them. They covered a range of topics including family, Sandra Day O’Connor, reincarnation, county fairs, and video games. It was a wonderful experience.

The closed the show with their newest song and had the audience sing along to a part of the chorus. It was a charming idea that formed a friendship between everyone in the room. I speak for myself and all of the audience when I say they gained several fans. I even bought their merchandise at the end. Without a doubt go check out Hirway and Youngs’ music and catch them on tour if you can.

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Chromic Duo is made up of Asian-American composers Dorothy Chan and Lucy Yao. The two artists are third-culture-kids and create sounds that describe the road to self-discovery. In their bio, the phrase “inspired by the small wonders of the everyday” encapsulates their inspiration for the music-making process.

In an interview with Little Village Magazine, Yao stated “A toy piano… might be something that you think is just for a kid to learn. But then when you start to look a little bit deeper, you notice that the toy piano actually has this beautiful character and all these different toy pianos are characters in themselves.” A sense of playfulness is at the heart of Chromic Duo’s pursuit to connect with those trying to find a sense of belonging.

Chromic Duo is no stranger to new modes of storytelling and delightfully integrate sound and visuals in their 2020 YouTube video entitled “Chromic Nightbloom.” The piece demonstrates multidimensional art and music production. Live generated visuals of pastel skies move cautiously along with the melancholic plucking of piano strings. Then, the mood changes to a more lighthearted composition and transports you to a tranquil dimension. Chromic Duo’s ability to reimagine everyday musical instruments will have you smiling and reminiscing on childhood curiosity and creativity.

The musical duo will bring their soundscapes to the Englert Theatre’s annual Witching Hour festival. Chromic Duo performs at the James Theater in Iowa City on October 21st at 7:30 P.M.

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The show sounded much like the planets in our solar system. DEBIT’s musical primordial soup demonstrated uncommon patience, like she was constantly fine-tuning her sound. She infused herself into the performance, breathing life into the speakers.

Her use of a special synthesizer known as “The Pipe” was particularly compelling. An instrument that functions by receiving incoming air and emitting synthesized tones, “The Pipe” is part vocoder, talk box, and kazoo all rolled into one. The results are unique sounds that command the audience’s attention.

The planetary music likened DEBIT’s performance to the Book of Genesis. The layered, droning, tonal weave reminded the audience that nobody had ever heard these exact sounds before, nor would they ever be heard again.

Like many creation stories, the purpose was not entertainment, but education. And with any good teacher, DEBIT was not the night’s subject. There were no crazy stage lights to claim our attention, no gaudy outfits, no other distractions. She drew all focus to her art. And for me, she was willing to give five minutes for an interview after the show.

I hung around afterwards, eavesdropping on her conversation with the theater crew. I learned that the crackling noises, which probably appeared intentional to most of the audience, were the reason the show ended early. DEBIT, who is currently on tour and departing for Europe soon, explained that “the challenge of electronic music is technical.”

The unintended feedback is just one of many technical issues that electronic artists have to deal with. But she embraces the challenge, saying that she enjoys “adding to the medium, and with experimentation comes risk.” She seeks catharsis for her audience, something that technical difficulties make difficult to achieve.

I asked her what she says to people who question whether her art is music. She smiled and said she hopes her art “encourages the question of what music is.” She spoke of her pride for the electronic genre and its acceptance into the cultural conscience as music. “Frequency creates tonality, which creates music, and at that point anything is up for grabs.”

Finally, I asked her what she hopes her audience takes away from her work. Without hesitating, she dove into what it means to be human and discovering “something fundamental to the human element, which everyone can relate to.” Her words leaned towards “cosmogony”: stories that explain creation in order to show how we relate to one another.

In speaking with her, I sensed wisdom beyond her years; an ancient soul who spoke eloquently and with authority. She is clearly a student of music and, through her vocation, has become a teacher. Her thirty-five minute lesson taught me that music’s capacity for inspiration (and dare I say catharsis) lies not in words nor sounds, but rather in the innate ability to reveal thoughts and emotions we did not know we had.

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