Saturday June 15 * 1-9pm * outside, weather allowing * $25 * TICKETS
Seventh Stanine Festival - A music festival put on by DC band The Caribbean and NPR-distributed show Essential Tremors. Featuring: Water Damage / Geologist / Tongue Depressor / Susan Alcorn / The Caribbean / Small Sur / Turner Williams / Jon Camp // DJs: Chad Clark, PJ Brownlee, Paul Vodra, Ryan Boddy // Beer: City-State
Full schedule here: https://seventhstanine.tumblr.com/lineup
Water Damage
Volume, repetition, volume, repetition, volume and repetition, this is the sonic mantra of Austin, Texas's Water Damage. On their new record "In E", Water Damage continues to scorch the earth with walls of punishing sound. It's no secret that something truly special can happen to the psyche when you are being pummelled with trance inducing drones, you can transcend time, you might laugh, you might cry but hopefully you look inward, letting a calm wash over you with metric tons of distortion. Water Damage are the rare "rock" band that follow in the lineage of artists like Faust, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich and Pärson Sound, one that creates such heavy yet minimalistic audio treasures that not only hit you viscerally but also give space to contemplate on your place in the cosmos. Their longest offering yet, Water Damage hits you with 4 side long tracks of krautpunk ending with a cover of "Ladybird" by Shit & Shine featuring Craig Clouse himself on vocals. Drone until you hear god speak.
- Joe Trainor, Dummy
Geologist (Animal Collective)
Brian Ross Weitz (born March 26, 1979), also known by his stage name Geologist, is a musician best known as a member of the experimental pop group Animal Collective. He provides electronic sound manipulations and samples for the band.
Tongue Depressor
Tongue Depressor (New Haven, CT) is the duo of Henry Birdsey (fiddle, lap steel) and Zach Rowden (fiddle, upright bass). They write, improvise, and perform music that draws from the fields of drone, harsh noise, and church music, often using microtonal tunings. Recent projects and releases include the the ongoing Fiddle Music series (currently at 5 volumes), Broad Is The Road That Leads To Death (2018 C/Site Recordings), and To See Not, a trio recording with percussionist Trevor Saint (Glockenspiel) out in January 2019 via Obsolete Staircases (Kentucky).
Susan Alcorn
Susan Alcorn is a Baltimore, Maryland-based composer and musician who has received international recognition as an innovator of the pedal steel guitar, an instrument whose sound is commonly associated with country and western music. Alcorn has absorbed the technique of C&W pedal steel playing and refined it to a virtuosic level. Her original music reveals the influence of free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and other musics of the world.
The Caribbean
"They're taking Brill Building songs and writing them in invisible ink, turning jazz standards into Twilight Zone episodes, turning folk songs into clouds of fog." -PopMatters
Small Sur
Led by Baltimore, MD-based musician and teacher Bob Keal, much of Small Sur’s music is earthy and visual, originating from the same foggy medium-fi tradition as Mt. Eerie and Grouper. Keal’s songs have long been personal tracts hosted in wild settings, where an encounter with nature looms large and helps the narrator sort through the messy reality of human life. As a review of Small Sur’s 2008 debut We Live in Houses Made of Wood put it, “These are nourishing songs, songs that are as close as we city-dwellers can get to the feeling of a strong harvest.” But in the process of becoming a parent and a teacher to small children, Keal’s narratives began to foreground the communal, more than the settings or even the self.
Turner Williams
My work begins with the fragmentary, a stand-in for the blinkered self & an instrument of allusion. The fragment suggests unseen wholes, intricate orders, & vast arcs of movement or form. The spontaneous assemblage of fragments offers dialogue between a subjectivity & something beyond it. I collect fragments to scatter them arbitrarily. Scattering is an extension, the expansion of a node into a network. Noticing resonance between the nodes of this network, I interact with their interactions; adding, subtracting, adjusting. This process only occurs in the present. Editing is improvisation. Materials and movements surf contingency. Boundaries leak, overlap, dissolve. Overlapping, interleaving, & nesting beget recursion, superimposition, and concrescence. There are always assemblages within assemblages, assemblages of assemblages.
Jon Camp
Like his heroes, Jon uses fingerstyle guitar as a gateway to explore wider sonic worlds that defy easy categorization. His compositions are just as likely to reflect the influence of drone or ambient as traditional folk or country. What makes Jon’s music particularly transfixing is his knack for crafting miniature musical vignettes that burrow in your head and spark your imagination. Listening to Jon’s recent self-titled release on Centripetal Force, I am struck by how these compositions possess an elemental quality — as if they were somehow birthed in the wild. Indeed, spending time with these compositions is like visiting a luminous, bucolic place that forces you to notice its natural beauty.
DJ’s
Chad Clark
PJ Brownlee
Paul Vodra
Ryan Boddy
Seventh Stanine is a gathering of artists who, against all promise of financial gain, notoriety, or any of the usual tropes associated with playing music, continue to make art because they have to; they can’t imagine their lives without it. Originating in 2016 with an idea by DC band The Caribbean to bring together friends, accomplices, and acquaintances, the first installation of the festival was held at the The Dew Drop Inn NE DC on Saturday June 3, 2017. Quoted in the Washington City Paper at the time, founder Matthew Byars said, “'I had long thought about having a festival in the smallest venue possible—literally like a tiny room,‘” says Byars of The Caribbean, a quietly beloved D.C. experimental-pop band. His daydream is now an actual thing. It’s called Seventh Stanine, a free all-day event planned for the Dew Drop Inn in Northeast D.C. The lineup is a roll call of artists The Caribbean knows well or at least admires, including (a number of) edgy-but-amiable acts.“ Now in its sixth year, this description is still apt, and the festival has featured over 50 different musical artists, growing in scope and scale each year.