OVERHANG

The band's extended family all went to the Chicago Symphony last Saturday to see CSO resident composer Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar. Here's an excellent summary of the piece by New York critic Alex Ross http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/osvaldo_golijov.html

We're definitely seeing some Latin music influences coming into our work from all sides. Joel's floor-mate at JPUSA has been showing Joel some Flamenco guitar techniques, Grant and Jeff are living in a Puerto Rican neighborhood and taking in the rhythms of South America and Spain. Nate is studying Spanish and listening to a lot of world music from Columbia and elsewhere. So it seemed like a good idea to take in Ainadamar at the CSO as a group. It was the first time we've all (including girlfriend and wives etc.--minus the children) been able to do something together for several months. Afterward we all ate at Russian Tea Time around the corner and had a few horse-radish vodka shots and talked about music and interpreted each others' dreams about cats and tornadoes, gigantic pickles and tight spaces. Though Ainadamar was very moving and inspiring, it certainly was not a fountain of tears for us sitting at the table munching on dark rye bread and pickled herring at the back of the restaurant last Saturday night.

Posted by Grant Elgersma at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We played two all ages shows the past two weeks, one at The Venue in Lafayette IN and the other in Mokena IL. The Lafayette show was great fun. We played with Leper, a goth band from JPUSA that brought several JPUSA community friends out. We were inspired by a random guy who showed up just to see who was playing at The Venue. He head-banged and danced passionately to our music, at one point crying out: "You guys rock! I want to have your babies." So we asked him to send us a DNA sample and we'd see what we could do. We're starting to think that folks in Chicago clubs are a bit stuffy compared to college and high school audiences in the suburbs and small towns. The Mokena show was great too. There were a bunch of people there to see May Queen, a funky rock band we played with at Trinity Christian College last Spring. Most of their fans stuck around to hear us play and we had a blast! People moshed to Beat Them to Hell and pulled out their lighters and cell phones for So Long and screamed and shouted during Scream and Shout just like we told them to. We are definitely having more fun on stage , partly because we feel more in command of our sound and we're starting to add new material to our sets and the new stuff seems to have a bit more live energy.

On another front, we have been added to 20 radio stations in the first couple weeks of promotion. "Until It's Arrived" is playing in Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Brunswick among other places. While all this is going on, we're also trying to drum up enough money to help with Joel's immigration fees and recording equipment costs. We're planning to start tracking some new songs at the end of this month and will continue doing so throughout the summer if everything goes as planned. Maybe we'll post some video and/or tracks of the new material here so you can follow our progress over the next few months.

Keep it surreal, home-bodies.

Posted by Grant Elgersma at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)