Sunday July 21 * 8pm * $10 * RSVP
On Adam Ostrar’s new album, The Worried Coat, he weaves together disparate voices, like a non-fiction version of Our Town written by Wyatt (Robert) ... there’s no “good guys” or “bad guys” … just a lot of under-medicated neuroses bringing out nastiness and empathy in these sonorous participants. Or, as Ostrar explains when nudged for a TV Guide asterisked pick-of-the-week summation, “It’s twelve narratives on otherness, self-identity, and our personal relationships with anxiety. How we often betray our best intentions through willful ignorance.”
Ostrar creates these characters over the course of 12 songs, each wearing a different hat: In “Alex the Cretin” you hear the evangelical snake-oil salesman high on Wizard A True Star-era Rundgren; “Bloody Waves” is the Bossa Nova buoy of a refugee’s displacement; in “Kansas City,” we hear Kevin Ayers, as Joe the Plumber, looking backwards on his false nostalgia; “Stormed the Beach” is the sound of Cluster employed by Greenpeace; “Walk the Savages Home” is the gurgle of Nativism and Corruption; And in “Morning Said,” Ostrar drops his tuning down to D and fills the page with pre-Page accent riffs while speaking to our forgotten good intentions.
Recorded in part in Mexico City courtesy of Richard Davies (The Moles) hand-me-down studio time and the other half at a ranch in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, but he wasn’t alone in making this album, he brought along Michael Krassner (Boxhead Ensemble, Lofty Pillars), Wil Hendricks (Califone, Simon Joyner), and Stephen Patterson (Hamilton Leithauser, White Rabbits).
This is Ostrar’s second solo album, the follow-up to 2017’s Brawls In the Briar. Before that, he led the early 2000 shag-carpet art-punk of Manishevitz, an early Jagjaguwar band that toured with The Mountain Goats and Edith Frost before the Internet tracked these things.
Raven Bauer Durham and James Wolf create their primarily improvisational music from their shared interests in song forms, noise, drone, and Appalachian sounds. Using strings, winds, and voices, they weave a conversation of consonant and dissonant movements. Bauer Durham and Wolf began playing together in the improvisational noise/drone ensemble Phoenix Auto Group in 2017. Soon after contributing sounds and art to each others solo work, (Raven Bauer Durham – Conversations; James Wolf – That, Engine Summer) they began working on improvised duo material. Over the course of five sessions they recorded The River and the Rain in It, released in April 2019.
Dais Queue is Davis Salisbury, based out of Washington, DC, playing solo guitar improvisations that move between prepared & extended techniques and minimalist melodic gestures. Focus is generally on shimmering textures, active sound fields, and resonant frequencies. Also one half of longstanding Charlottesville duo Grand Banks.