Revolt of the ILX Brigade: New Post-Fahey Folk For PPL that post in the Takoma & Tompkin's Square Threads

tyler to thread! xxp

Bumping this so Tyler sees that Colorado/Denver request up above.

yesss, i live here in colorado. record stores ... twist and shout is sorta the big one, maybe amoeba-lite. there's wax trax, too, which is OK, though maybe past its prime. best one is a little bit out of the way, but might be worth it: www.blackandread.net
as for shows, yeah, i'm probably on record in this thread complaining that we don't get a lot of these guys out here for whatever reason. don't think UMS, global tetrahedron or grandavis have played here once! lame.

Holding out for that Tyler-curated Aquarium Drunkard/Revolt of the ILX Brigade showcase.

seems like a no-brainer -- i wish i knew how to do stuff like that!

Worth figuring it out so you can get all the actual touring folks to come to you.

yes agree
get someone in the mayor's office to lend a hand -- it's good for tourism! just ask knoxville.

in other news, my drumming has improved a lot! just here to remind y'all in case you're feeling beat-starved.

i even work for the tourism bureau.
send me a beat LL! i could do something with it probably. tywilc AT gmail

Man Colorado is so beautiful, I would think folks would be into a festival kinda thing there, it is just a question of where else they would play along the way. I mean, a bunch of folks are hitting up this festival in Asheville, and it is just being put on by a record store. I have no idea how things like this get organized, but this is a good line-up to model a small-ish festival after:

http://harvest-records.com/transfigurations/

i'm on it!

Note The Clean at the top of the list Tyler. You gotta get Aquarium Drunkard to sponsor you covering these kinda things.

yeah seems like doing something like that in Boulder would be great.
here's where I'd do it
http://www.genealogybug.net/Postcards/chautauqua.JPG

Whoa, that looks great. Sign me up.

that harvest fest looks great

though

it's kinda weird to start a record label 10 years ago and call it Harvest, given like there was a p iconic Harvest Records and they seem like ppl who would know that

ha, i know! i was confused when i heard about that fest -- like "harvest records still exists ... in Asheville?" i guess the OG harvest still exists -- they just put out a death grips record of all things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Records

but the asheville harvest can call themselves whatever they want if they can get a lineup like that together

ha, i was just in denver not long ago! i recommend drinking beers in fishman park. other than that, i don't know much!

there is a cool 'folklore center' which is really just a great old-timey instrument shop, lots of mandolins and resonators and such, pretty cool to check out. when i was there, there were a great crew of older dudes, probably mid 70s, just jamming out... was kinda jealous that that's how they got to spend their time

yeahhh, that place is very cool. http://www.denverfolklore.com

Definitely weird in re the name of the label (Harvest), but I don't think putting records out is a big priority for them, I think the store is much more the focus of the business. Still, I have no idea how a record store in a small-ish town in the mountains of North Carolina gets all of those folks to come to this kind of thing, but that would be a cool place for it to happen. If I ever hit the road, I am definitely going to play Asheville.

I think Transfigurations is big enough to bring people down from Maryland/DC/Virginia and bring people up from further south or a bit futher West. Morgantown, WV is where Decoder Mag is based and there's a pretty decent group out there. Though I wouldn't put it past Asheville to stock most of the shows at Harvest, Asheville is huge with weirdo jam dudes and I think it's growing with the weirdo experimental crowd. Went to Transfigurations in 09 I think and it was amazing. Espers played, Brightblack Morning Light didn't show so Meg Baird did a solo set with Gunn backing her, Gunn did a solo set, Bonnie Prince Billy, I dunno what else but I loved it, it was pretty packed with people too.

That Inner Mountain Fest back in 2012 was fucking amazing though, MV+EE curated it as sort of a follow up to their Brattleboro free folk meet ups from the early 00's.

Yeah, Asheville was cool when I visited. Tashi Dorji is based there, and the Bathetic label amongst other cool shit. Transfigurations I lineup looks cool too, wonder how a 5 year old store got all those folks to come! Must be well-connected folks. Tempted to go to this, it is only a little over 5 hours away, but probably not going to work for me.

Harvest's roots run pretty deep - a lot of these folks were invited to play the fest because many of them played the first instores the store hosted when they were a much smaller deal (they're one of the lucky record stores that has been able to actually expand - see also Grimeys in Nashville). Grandavis correct in that the label has never seemed like too high a priority - the store was first, and I think naming the label after the store just seemed like an obvious thing to do at that point. I think their first release was a Hush Arbors record? One of his best ones, too.

I do wish Tashi was playing - conspicuous in his absence. May have said this upthread, but his was the best show I've seen in 2014, hands down. That quibble aside though, I'm pretty psyched about this lineup.

Maybe Tashi will be on the road slinging that Hermit Hut record about to come out ....

Cheers for the heads up on all the Denver stuff - looks brilliant. My sister lives out near City Park and used to live out near Arvada so will definitely go check out Black and Read. And that Folklore Center looks ace.

I live down in the south of England and no bastard comes down this way, so I feel you pain. Though, admittedly, London is only an hour and a half away, so I should stop whining.

Are there record shops in Boulder, btw? I've been a couple of times, but only ever come across (great) bookshops.

there used to be a couple on College Hill... in 1989

haha, well albums on the hill is still there. i've never been that amazed with them though at least in the last 10 years.
absolute vinyl is OK, not a huge selection, but pretty nice. there's a place called bart's too, but i haven't been to their new location... a record store just opened in my town actually, which is about 20 minutes from Boulder, but i thought everything was pretty overpriced. black and read is probably the one you want if you can make - great books, good selection, decent prices.
and yeah, if i lived near a city like london i would probably be constantly wracked with guilt for *not* going to shows. i can just complain from afar out here.

I found such amazing stuff on my 1989 trip, one of my most fondly remembered score sessions... OG 7" singles on Industrial records for like $3, Pop Group, This Heat, Poison Girls, Delta 5, so much good stuff.

/derail

crazy how different boulder must've been at that point. it's all fancy restaurants and start up companies now.

My Boulder memory: going into a second hand bookshop that was playing Charlambides; finding a copy of Ian Carr's book on Miles; walking through the town and up into the hills; reading under the dome of the sky listening to Sketches of Spain. I think I left part of myself up there.

Hah hah that is amazing Chinaski. I spent a really formative summer in Boulder when I was in college. I wanted to get out of the Northeast for a bit and thought Colorado would be a nice geographic change (plus I had some friends there), but got pretty disappointed at first cause everyone I met seemed to be a Northeastern boarding school transplant type. I had just turned 19, gotten really into Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr./Butthole Surfers/Pavement and other popular weird-ish bands (summer of '94) and so didn't really want to be meeting exclusively folks whose musical interests ended at The Dead/Allmans/Phish/Bob Marley. I mean, I should have seen it coming, but still.

After about a month of disappointment, in one week I saw Allen Ginsberg hanging out in a bar mutliple times, found the good record store in town that had a ton of great stuff and folks working who were cool sharing knowledge, and saw Drive Like Jehu live for the first and only time, which was definitely a life-changing event for me. I had never seen anything like that live before. So, despite all the weird angsty stuff I went through that summer, mission accomplished in some fundamental ways. Plus the scenery is amazing, so I just ended up ditching the idea of meeting people and instead hiked around with my walkman listening to "Yank Crime" over and over and over.

well this looks fairly sick:

http://www.sixorgans.com/tashi-dorji-on-tour-with-sir-richard-bishop/

Yeah, Bishop is of course sick on his own, Dorji is a good counterpoint as they play so differently. Would love to see one of those shows.

That's brilliant, grandavis - sounds idyllic. See, I've wandered through Boulder a few times, now and <i>always</i> had the feeling that something interesting was happening, just round the corner (something is happening here/ But you don't know what it is) - to the point where I thought 'I could live here'. I imagine it'd be a tiring place to live, in truth, but it's nice to have the dream! I can imagine seeing Jehu around then must have been amazing.

I've also got the urge to find whichever house Harold Lauder had his sordid dungeon in, but that's another story.

Jehu was, indeed, amazing. While far from idylic other than the hiking/scenery, I sure have some good stories from that summer overall. Was definitely still a pretty weird place in 2004, just took me a while to find the good side of that weirdness. One fun Boulder fact: when I went to meet a guy about a house painting gig, which is what I did for work then, his first question to me was "what's your sign".

If anyone is interested, this formless track is my go-to as a point of reference to show people that have only ever thought of Calexico as some Neko Case/Wilco-style surface level indie rock band with a gimmick. Hope I've spread out the Calexico praising enough throughout this thread to give everyone's eyes a rest from all the rolling it prompts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRGns0huaCM

I would shut up if I got someone to listen to the album that shares that same name (Hot Rail).

(I know beyond a handful of tracks they aren't very relevant to this thread either. I like all of the people in here though and wanted to share.)

i like calexico

though i also like wilco and neko case

she's a good singer! ilx kind of hates both of them on "NPR" principle cuz that kind of respectable indie rock is sort of the anti-ILX aesthetic

but just between us girls i'd say that there's tons of literal garbage that gets voted on ILX year end lists and shit that is way worse than Wilco or Neko

though i guess neither is like super exciting or crazy or w/e

American Primitive by way of thee ancient trade routes: traveling by and to "Taxim," brothers and sisters (pick it)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shYpM6a62vs&feature=kp

xp there should probably be a no-shame alt-country thread on ilm.
that early calexico stuff (especially the instrumentals) is totally great (also dig the friends of dean martinez jams they were involved with). it is weird, they definitely took it in a more generic direction. last one i really listened to was garden ruin and while it wasn't *bad* it was just not something i wanted to listen to.

i generally like them the most when they seem like some kinda tex mex Tortoise

("Taxim" is very unrepresentative of the LP, and my fave track by far)Sorry to break into yall's conversation, but I just keep playing this

yeahhh taxim is so killer. i wish they just sounded like that all the time. talk about a band with a LOT of ideas.

neko case fan here, 'blacklisted' in particular. alt-country was actually probably a bit of a gateway drug into some of this kind of music tbh. i think alt country gets a bad rep bc it seems like some kind of watered-down, upperclass or 'sepia toned museum photograph' version of whatever hardscrabbleness is supposedly actually conveyed for real by other country artists, but i also like that quality too. i like it all, idk. ashley monroe and miranda and neko and calexico and friends of dean martinez, all good shit.

i saw calexico live in maybe 2002, one of the better shows i've seen since i moved to los angeles.

I'm glad to hear all that!

Yeah the "NPR vibe" was the description I was struggling to conjure. It does seem very anti-ILX, and I don't have a problem with any of them (aka Neko Case or Wilco) generally. I guess that's why I feel very uncool gushing about them here, but Hot Rail (the album) remains so impressive and it doesn't age for me at all. They have some tour only albums (since reissued) that are also mostly experimental jams and those are great too. And I feel like many of the "ILX Brigade" club would enjoy them.

this is a jam:

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0003/338/MI0003338078.jpg?partner=allrovi.com