Photos by Josh Sisk With the Artscape DJ Culture stage relegated to some Wind-Up Space shows last Friday and Saturday night—a kind of cruel and confusing shift, given that July is the one year anniversary of K-Swift’s death and club’s massive global growth over the past year—My Crew Be Unruly 2, the second edition...
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| Image by City Paper Digi-Cam It was hard to know what to expect for my first time seeing Out of Your Head, the collective that performs at the Windup Space every Tuesday, especially since unpredictability is a built-in function of the event. Each week, a new combination of musicians assembles to improvise a...
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George Russell | Image by vervemusicgroup.com Jazz composer/bandleader/theorist George Russell passed away Monday after a long illness. His was far from a household name even in many jazz-loving households, but cognoscenti will mourn him for a career that encompassed an influential theoretical treatment of modal playing in jazz (The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal...
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Longbottom | Image by City Paper Digi-Cam “This is actually the first song of their set,” someone at the bar joked, while Longbottom noisily set up and started testing out its equipment at Joe Squared last Wednesday night. The Baltimore quintet-a drummer, bassist, guitarist, and two trumpet players-boasted an extensive array of electronics in...
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| Image by City Paper Digi-Cam DJ Jonny Blaze has been a key figure in Baltimore club for more than a decade. So when I contacted him for an interview recently, he was understandably curious about what took me so long to look him up. But the fact of the matter is, well, there’s...
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Well, the full title of the song is “Two Cocks Waving Wildly at Each Other Across a Vast, Open Space, a Dark, Icy Tundra” but, wouldn’t you know it, there’s a character count limit on these blog titles. And it’s the “dark, icy tundra” part that really matters here. Billed as most likely Jana...
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High Zero, the improvised music festival that makes for one of the finest gems in Baltimore’s cultural landscape, e-mail announced the details of its 11th edition last night. The festivities take place the weekend of Sept. 10-13, once again at the Theatre Project. Out of town performers include folks such as Andrea Neumann (“inner...
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Baltimore’s Creepy Murdle—bassist Anne Feinstein; her husband, guitarist/snarler Rich Feinstein; and drummer Clay Holland—might be MT6 Records’ most accessible signees yet. Sure, their macro-aggro crunch on debut The Little Things That Kill You comes cloaked a scrim of psychedelic bubblewrap; sure, Feinstein’s clipped, anarchistic dispatches seem to have been recorded via a busted CB...
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It’s an odd sensation to go see a familiar act, who you consider to pretty well known, open up for a band you’ve never heard of. Such was the case on Saturday night at Rams Head Live, when Ted Leo and the Pharmacists took second billing to State Radio, a jam band that, based...
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Mickey Free | Image by City Paper Digi-Cam The Baltimore Round Robin Tour is perhaps the local indie music’s greatest gift to the world of live performance: having several acts set up on small stages in one room at the same time, and take turns playing songs, is such a brilliant idea it’s a...
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Almost as a rule, we don’t expect weavers of mercilessly dark, navel-gazing music to be forthcoming about either their craft or themselves. So we were shocked, during an e-mail exchange with Jasper TX’s Dag Rosenqvist, to find him so voluble an interview subject. Below is the full interview transcript, much of which wouldn’t fit...
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The ultimate irony of Sonic Youth’s continued existence after nearly 30 years is not that the band dared to grow old, but that such an original and experimental band is the definition of a well-oiled machine, with a touring routine form which it rarely deviates. For more than a decade, that cycle has consisted...
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The club space at Sonar is always an intimate setting for local hip-hop shows, but Thursday night’s release party for Paused In Time, C.O.S.T. Entertainment’s documentary about Baltimore hip-hop, may have been the most relaxed and friendly show the room’s ever seen. Before and between performances, excerpts of the film played on a projector...
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Midas and Kane | Image by City Paper Digi-Cam Driving up to Reservoir Hill last Thursday night, I realized that I’d been to my destination before; the John Eager Howard Recreation Center is the practice space for the Dream Nation Marching Band, who I wrote about for a City Paper story last year. Now,...
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