Double Dagger So it is that today, Oct. 21, 2011, marks the last-ever show for Baltimore’s own Double Dagger. City Paper has done an appreciative feature and a do-it-yourself six-panel poster, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t offer some more words from the band. In researching the former, I sat down with lead...
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By Adriano Fagundes In this week’s cover story, we talked to Animal Collective members Brian Weitz and David Portner—aka Geologist and Avey Tare, respectively—about their recent return to Maryland to write new material following the huge success of their 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion. All four members spent January through March working in a...
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The Farm The best Baltimore rock show happening this weekend may actually be all the way out in Carroll County. This Saturday, leading lights of the local indie scene like Lower Dens and Arbouretum will be heading up a bill of nine bands from in and out of town on the Carney Family Farm...
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Compact Lexie Mountain rummages through her tape collection, pulls out yet another cassette and pops it into the Centennial tape player on the floor. “Her tapes are bonkers,” Mountain says of the woman on the recording. Play. “God, I wish I could stop shaking,” says the woman. Audibly, she shutters, shivers. Then silence for...
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Solar Temple Suicides The first instrumental element you’ll take real note of in a Solar Temple Suicides song is the bass. It’s not shy, that bass. It’s prominent in the mix: bold, booming, probing, a sweet, mellow groundswell carrying the rest of this Baltimore-based group’s earthenware psychedelic grooves on its muscular back like an...
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by Jay Crossley At the time of this interview, which was arranged and conducted in the span of several hours after it was announced that Will Adams was leaving Lower Dens on April 25, there was a growing local controversy surrounding an ExxonMobil commercial touting oil-sands technology. The reason: the oil company licensed the...
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Jana Hunter, courtesy Gnomonsong In a flurry of tweets and Facebook status updates on Monday, Lower Dens announced that Will Adams would be leaving the band due to exhaustion. It was the second major lineup change since the start of the year, the first being the departure of drummer Abe Sanders in early January....
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Adventure, minus band After many placed him within the chip-tune movement, Baltimore-based electronic musician Benny Boeldt has drastically changed the sound of his project Adventure. His new album, Lesser Known, is filled with bubbly synth-pop that sounds like the music kids listened to in the ‘80s when they turned off the Nintendo and switched...
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On Sunday night the latest experimental music endeavor with firm Baltimore roots makes it local debut. Co-organized and -founded by local composer and musician David Smooke, the League of the Unsound Sound is a loose ensemble dedicated not only to exploring new composed music and improvisation, but to advocating for both of those camps...
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MC Height More than a decade ago, Dan Keech began rapping under the name Height, forming the short-lived hip-hop group Wounds with a few high school buddies and later releasing three solo albums. In 2009, however, he began billing his records as Height With Friends, first with Baltimore Highlands and then last year’s Bed...
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By Yuri Woodstock One of the stranger things we’ve heard about as of late is Artistika, a venue in Greensboro, North Carolina, just a few minutes from Quaker liberal arts school Guilford College, that’s hosting Baltimore club shows: A late November Say Wut show, and last month, DJ Pierre, Murder Mark (with Tt the...
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By Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez It wasn’t long ago that Dan Deacon was touring via Greyhound bus and living the unglamorous, underground art-collective lifestyle. Well, he still does. Mostly. But last week, it was announced that he’ll be scoring the new Francis Ford Coppola movie, Twixt Now and Sunrise, starring Val Kilmer. Late last week,...
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spermwhales Spermwhales songs have titles like “Daydreams,” “Dwell Forever,“ and “Surf Out Of Forever” that telegraph the cerebral, blunted atmospheres that Spermwhales’ Brent Grant taps into with little more than a guitar, effects pedals, and an impeccable melodic intuition. His prismatic, hypnotic drones, tonal-pond ripples, and Wavves-esque surf-noise is nothing short of beautiful. Occasionally,...
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Warpaint The guitars of Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman interlocking in sequin-sparkle shimmer or sinuous smolder; Jenny Lee Lindburg’s bass notes pacing thoughtfully at melody’s edge; Stella Mozgawa’s keyboards adding depth and texture to the whole even as her drumming propels it. This is the intoxicating sound of Warpaint , an Los Angeles-based foursome...
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GayBomb By day, Andrew Barranca works as a special educator, assisting children with autism. In his spare time, the Fredrick native (who now resides in Rockville) moonlights as GayBomb, whipping up sonic-slurry shakes–created in part using a card reader Barranca discovered “in the supply closet of my first classroom”–that suggest a hybrid of industrial...
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Read: The Oranges Band recalls The Whole Ten Years In the process of gathering stories for this week’s remembrance of the Oranges’ first decade, writer Joe Tropea spent some time on the phone with guitarist/vocalist/songwrite Roman Kuebler, a conversation that offered more background on the band that didn’t fit into the story. Here’s the...
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Fred Schneider sounds exhausted. It’s an evening in mid-March, and the party-pop icon is at home in New York City—holding forth about his recent musical exploits and the impetus for tonight’s performance at the American Visionary Arts Museum—and he just seems wiped out, like most mere mortals are at 10 p.m. on an average...
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