Stereopathic » Stereopathic

Sera Cahoone, Goldfinch & Bart Budwig at Belltower

Branden Harvey — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 23:28:23 +0000

Check out photos from the show shot by Pullman photographer, Branden Harvey.

More photos after the jump!

Betsy Olson

miltensauce — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:04:20 +0000

“A lot of my songs are blues-based and guitar driven. For me, it’s more about the feeling that the sound of the song gives you. I would hope that it gets you to tap your foot and think about how that crazy fool broke your heart!” Betsy Olson’s metal blues pulls shoulders to swaying and old flames to re-kindling. Imagine a 70’s garage-rock band with a Patsy Cline at the mic and you are balancing at the intensity level of a suspension cable. That’s good. That’s Betsy Olson of Billings, Montana. After a childhood of Saturday mornings infused with classic rock and an education in classical music, Olson is toting some pretty hefty weights at both ends of the spectrum, but dang, she’s a two-bucket woman and so she can do what she wants to and do it better than you or the scum-ball that left her.

Betsy Olson, playing Friday night, 1st May, 8:00 p.m., with Sera Cahoone and Karli Fairbanks, the American Legion Cabin. Don’t be late.

Sera Cahoone

miltensauce — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:27:33 +0000

NPR Music calls her “soft as an old shawl.” Sub-Pop Records labels her country-noir, indie ling coined in the attempt to disassociate the term country from connotations of Toby Keith, Martina McBride and Dodge Ram advertisements. Sera Cahoone\’s graceful lo-fi alternative-country canters half-way back to the classic 70’s folk movement with a soft firm drum and a strong alto and wedges the rest of her music in comfy blue-grass denim. “I got my own style! BAM!” she says, and then acknowledges her favorite decade.

Cahoone’s tight hand at the drums earned herself a stint with Carissa\’s Wierd and Carissa’s offspring, Band of Horses, before she took matters into her own hands and moved on to the greener pastures of creative freedom where she is currently playing. “If something hits me a certain way that gets me to sit down and write,” says Cahoone, who grew up in Denver and began performing drums at age 12. “There are a lot of issues that move me, but more recent is [the] Columbine High School 10 year anniversary,” she shares, “It breaks my heart. It’s a little too close to home for me.”
Jay Kardong, the band’s pedal-steel player hails from Moscow, “so we are really looking forward to the show,” Cahoone volunteers. Might I submit that we are pretty entirely stoked for this show as well? We are pretty entirely stoked for this show.
Friday, 1st May, 8:00 p.m., Sera Cahoone is playing with Betsy Olson and Karli Fairbanks at the American Legion Cabin.

Alexis Gideon: Antics/Musics

miltensauce — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:01:43 +0000

The sticks hit the timpani with a simple tap to start a song, beat beat beat. You can almost see a smirk form in the corner of the drummer’s mouth as the beat intensifies and an electronica symphony elides into the beat. The start of an Alexis Gideon piece of schizo-rap is like catching the moment when Fred Astaire simultaneously alights onto a set and a song and discovers that he can dance – the possibilities crackle and the potential hides in a corner waiting to burst out screaming “surprise!” to scare his maiden auntie.

“I meld rap with a lot of other genres,” Gideon explains: “so many things inspire me.” Gideon continues his list: “sounds of traffic, light through trees” – a clash of textures produced by light and sound colliding that flickers into his music through his multi-media interests. Strobe-lit blocks of color base dancing Japanese kitsch in a music vid, Flight of the Liophant, and the liophant finds his way home in the same heart-warming cartoon musical performed by paper chain characters. The liophant? It’s a lion, with the head of a pachyderm and with the wings of a dragon-fly, and probably most closely related to Gideon drumming a rap with a ukulele somewhere in his back pocket and the Casio keyboard singing love. His choice to cast Godzilla as the protagonist of his production of Hungarian folklore translated into video opera allies somewhere very nearby on the food chain. Obviously, zanzithophones, ligers and Haribo Technicolor Jellybeans nest in similar topographical locations, although it might take an Alexis Gideon to put them all together and make us wonder what they mean.

Gideon will perform Video Musics at the Nuart Theatre on Wedn., 22 April, 2009, at 8:00 p.m., with Shelley Short.

Molly is a freelance journalist and a senior at New St. Andrew’s College with a special interest in postcards and goldfish. She writes for The Loop 21 and keeps the blog A New Amsterdam.

Lake – Oh the Places We’ll Go

miltensauce — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:53:23 +0000

Ashley Eriksson, musician and songstress of Lake the Band, balanced an instrument that looked like a flexible candelabra during a couple of songs at their recent show at the Fontee Fest in Anacortez, WA. “I thought it was this weird, random sculpture that was in the back of this really creepy old house that I lived at,” she explained, but, being the artist that she is, Ashley ignored the ghosts and saw the potential for musicality. Now, the Garden Bells are a definitive piece of Lake’s extra-ordinary charm. As Ashley said, “We like to be eclectic, we like to connect with people.”

The seven members of Lake share a connection that spreads through the audience. Each member is a unique artist on his own right. They play musical chairs with their instruments like they are having a good time with friends at a house party – Ashley picked up a guitar here, put down a tambourine there, and moved over to the keyboard in between chiming in with vocals and garden bells during their show at the Fontee Fest – and their obvious charisma invites the audience in to join.

“We’re like a band, a real band,” Eli Moore, a fellow Lake member, chimed in. “We’ve been trying to do things more old-fashioned, with everyone playing at once rather than doing things over and over.” Ashley told me that they aim for a friendly sound that has a “life to it, a breadth,” and I completely agree that they are right on the mark.

Eli tells me that a creative role model is the producer and musician Karl Blau, a close friend of the band. “We work with him and we really look up to his music, and his ethics,” he says. “In recording, [this] has a lot do with embracing happy accident, things you didn’t plan. Taking things for what they are, value things that happen by chance.”

“When I moved to the Northwest was when I started going to lakes a lot,” Ashley explained, and the name seems to cover the gist of the ideas behind the band. A lake represents the Northwest, peace and summer, spending time with your friends, she said, a lot of ideas converged into one general picture of happy times. It’s the sort of serendipity that the music of Lake communicates.

Lake is coming to Moscow: March 25 2009, Wedn., 8:00 p.m, The Nuart Theatre (516 S. Main St., Moscow ID 83843). Check em out: MySpace, Heaven Vimeo, Ashley & Eli (Water Island)

Molly is a freelance journalist and a senior at New St. Andrew’s College with a special interest in postcards and goldfish. She writes for The Loop 21 and keeps the blog A New Amsterdam.