Yr. Weekend, Pt. 3: Screwed Anthologies + Gray Tapes (MP3!) + B L A C K I E
On to Part III of the weekend’s festivities… Sadly, Sunday, May 30th only boasts one show that really does much for me, and that’s the latest installment of the Resonant Interval Sound Series at Khon’s Bar.
This week, the Resonant Interval crew’s put together something a little different, in honor of late H-town icon DJ Screw, progenitor of that weird-ass, slowed-down brand of hip-hop that somehow ended up coming out of this city and spreading nation(world-?)wide. The headliners call themselves Screwed Anthologies, but you’d probably know ’em better as Dave Dove (ex-Sprawl, MECA, and a bunch of other musical projects, mostly of the improvisational/experimental variety) and Lucas Gorham (currently fronting {Grandfather Child} and Sad Gorilla, ex-of {Satin Hooks}).
The former does weird, whale-song-sounding things with his trombone, while the latter scrapes and slides along with his lap steel, all over screwed loops and beats, grafting the whole screw genre to John Zorn-ish free jazz with a blowtorch and than banging on it ’til it sounds good. (Or, if not “good,” by the definition of pop music, at least “interesting”). The whole thing was originally commissioned as part of an art exhibit at the gallery labotanica, but the guys decided to take it beyond the gallery & out into the world. Check out a sample of what they should like over here.
Then there’s {Gray Tapes}, which may or may not be Lance Higdon‘s ({Tambersauro}, {Golden Cities}, {Wall With One Side}, etc.) hip-hop side project — Lance himself was oblique about it in the past, just saying it was “one of the Esotype guys,” but I’ve since heard different. Guess you’ll have to hit the show to find out for sure… The inclusion on the bill’s pretty appropriate (as is the next, for reasons that’ll be pretty obvious), since Tapes did a choppped-&-screwed remix of {B L A C K I E}‘s “I Write On Money”…which, fittingly, yours truly has been meaning to post up here for a loooong while now.
So, better late than never, right? Here you go:
Not entirely sure what his non-remix stuff sounds like, but it’s bound to be cool. Apparently the aim is to recreate DJ Screw’s original “gray tape” sound, back when he was selling mixtapes of his tracks on old Maxell cassettes…
And, of course, there’s the aforementioned B L A C K I E, who does hip-hop like there isn’t a damn rule to be found (or at least, not broken) and sounds like a beat-bomb dropped on a home for the dangerously disturbed. And yes, I mean to say that that’s a cool thing to hear; his beats crush and stomp like D&aum;lek’s or Techno Animal’s, but with harshly personal, paranoiac lyrics like, well, like nobody you can name. Seriously.
The fun starts at 7:45PM, and the admission’s between $5 and $8 — this is also apparently a tour kickoff show for the three crews, who’ll be hitting the road for the next three weeks. Catch ’em while you can…
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