With diverse dance nights and boundary-pushing local shows galore, Portland nightclub Holocene really does its part to build up the music community in Portland. To close out the year 2012, Gina Altamura and Van Pham have rounded up a list of their favorite local acts that you should pay attention to in 2013.

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Shy Girls __ www.facebook.com/shygirlsmusic
Within a rising tide of young contemporary R&B artists, including oft-cited luminaries like Frank Ocean and How to Dress Well, we find Portland’s own Shy Girls. The music of Shy Girls tracks most closely with this emerging R&B zeitgeist in its reverence for emotional sensitivity. R&B, as a genre, finds strong emotions to be inherently valuable. It’s a genre where those brought to tears by the slightest experience are given a narrative voice, even – or especially – a narrative beyond interpretive specificity. Beyonce moans, “it’s just emotions taking me over”; Mariah Carey croons, “you’ve got me feeling e – mo – tions”. There is sublimity in this genre where the heart is prized, and Shy Girls are making magic with that spiritual force. - GINA ALTAMURA
++ SEE ALSO: ALL SHY GIRLS-RELATED COVERAGE

Editor’s Note: Said lady Gina Altamura celebrates her Capricornian birthday on January 3rd, and will be holding a show at Holocene featuring Shy Girls, PWRHAUS, and Houndstooth (descriptions for all three bands in this post). See the Facebook invite HERE. - VIVIAN HUA

Brainstorm www.soundcloud.com/brainstormbrainstorm
Brainstorm’s Adam Baz spends his summers as a seasonal biologist, counting bird populations in the wilds of northern California. As part of his training for this endeavor, he’s set to work memorizing a formidable number of distinct bird songs. Perhaps it’s this unique study that’s helped to gift him with such a meticulously fine-tuned ear for melody: its manifold nuances, its multitudinous possibilities. Brainstorm make beatific pop, and their exuberance seems to stem from weaving such an intricate web of sound. Face-melting guitar shredding from Patrick Phillips calls to mind art rock, but his heavy flirtation with West African polyrhythms takes things to another level. Throw in some three-part harmonies with vocalist/bassist Dasha Shleyeva, some mystical polka vibes when Patrick picks up the tuba, plus the twinkly psych-pop of Adam’s toy keyboard, and – well – freak out on the abundance! - GINA ALTAMURA
++ SEE ALSO: ALL BRAINSTORM-RELATED COVERAGE

CLOAKS __ www.soundcloud.com/visiblecloaks
An effort that’s half Spencer Doran from Operative and half Ryan Carlisle from Eternal Tapestry, this duo rests squarely in the middle of those two paths – a rad combo of experimental meanderings that can sometimes unexpectedly crash land you into a healthy, heart-pumping, body-warming house beat. These two do much to ease your toes into the easy waters of a totally enjoyable mix of synth-based, vocoder-tinged forest-walking fodder and dance party-ready sentiments. My only complaint is that they don’t have much material available online to pick from and enjoy, but you’ll have to take my word for it (or come see them perform at the opening of Xhurch’s 2012 Nativity!). - VAN PHAM

Editor’s Note: Catch CLOAKS at Xhurch (4550 NE 20th) in Portland on December 21st for an end-of-the-world party featuring bands like MSHR and Hair And Space Museum and large-scale art installations with infinite light tunnels, 3-dimensional holograms, and alchemy-related sound booths. It is also the joint birthday party for Emily Pothast of Seattle’s Midday Veil and yours truly. Facebook invite HERE. - VIVIAN HUA

PWRHAUS __ www.soundcloud.com/pwrhaus
Almost definitely one of the best soul groups you’ve never heard, PWRHAUS has been rocking house parties in relative obscurity, but thanks to an utterly warm live show and word of mouth from such notable admirers as Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, they’re starting to romance ever-larger audiences. There’s a horn section, a stand-up bassist, a commanding crooner behind a tinsel-draped piano, and much more….all working deftly together to convey an intoxicatingly peculiar take on classic soul. Frontman Tony Star oozes a strange and wonderful charm onstage that you’ll delight in never quite being able to wrap your mind around. - GINA ALTAMURA

PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEROSENE ROSE

Swahili __ www.soundcloud.com/swahilinoise
Cosmonauts for the dance floor! Far-out lovelies Swahili are skillfully incorporating elements of dub and proto-house into their electronic psych soundscapes, crafting a listening experience that is pulsing with visceral energy while compelling you towards transcendence. To borrow a famous alchemical phrase: “As above, so below”. Not only do we find this notion of cosmic oneness explored literally in their lyrics and album art, we find it sonically connoted so deeply here in this symmetrical understanding of dance music and psychedelia. Only through understanding of the inner world, the spirit bound within the human form, may we unlock the corresponding splendor and mystery of the outer universe. In this way, the dancefloor is given such a noble purpose; perhaps dancing really will save us. - GINA ALTAMURA
++ SEE ALSO: ALL SWAHILI-RELATED COVERAGE

Concrete Floor __ www.soundcloud.com/concretefloor
A delightful duo that boasts members of ASSS, The Crow, and Onuinu, Concrete Floor is a practice in pummeling, iron-clad and hard-wrought EBM sound. Fat synth lines weave in and out of each other on top of atmospheric swells and seemingly unrelenting rhythmic blasts, creating a bleak but intriguing landscape. It’s not unlike a badass lost level on Mortal Kombat, or the soundtrack to one’s descent into madness. Their name, coupled with track titles like “Prince of Darkness” and “Metal Clamps”, solidifies their place in the greyscale palette of drearier acts like Throbbing Gristle and SPK, but without the aid of a deranged frontman, making them capable of toeing the line of being a bit more sleek. - VAN PHAM

Magic Fades __ magicfades.bandcamp.com
Magic Fades, as a production duo, is deliberately post-internet. Standing on the front lines of the radical potential of digital technology, they align themselves with the Vaporwave movement’s avant-garde regurgitation of ubiquitous media (for reference, see Adam Harper’s excellent article on the subject: http://dummymag.com/features/2012/07/12/adam-harper-vaporwave/). In their accompanying visual aesthetic (ghetto 3D animation gracing their digital singles, CGI roses and the darkest corners of The Sims fan forums used as live projections) as well as their vocal one (R&B crooning, nostalgic for late ’90s boy bands all the way down to their proclivity for earnestness over raw sex appeal), the key point here is that the fantasy is all that exists. Time to romance the precession of simulacra, bbs. - GINA ALTAMURA

Atriarch __ atriarch.bandcamp.com
Black metal band Atriarch offers up the usual trappings of an act in their field – sinister doom and gloom shrouded in darkness, wailing guitars, thick and foggy atmospherics. But this grip of dudes pull it off with a little more bookish sort of spiritual style, snatching a passage from the Upanishads for their latest album’s ethereal coda, “Outro (Lucifer Speakers With Death).” It’s thoughtful, creepy material that seeks to grab you by the guts. Their latest work, Ritual of Passing, makes more use of synths and relies heavily on a macabre tone, menacing as it is expansive. They ride the trajectory of other slowly agonizing, pummeling bands like Swans, and singer Lenny Smith is able to switch gears easily from croaker, yeller, crooner, screamer, to orator — not unlike a pastor. Let their hypnotic work pull you in, initiate of their dark church. - VAN PHAM

Litanic Mask __ www.soundcloud.com/litanic-mask
From the creative partnership of Kenna Jean and Mark Burden is a project devoted to airy, tender melancholy. Immediate comparisons cue up Zola Jesus and other Portland bands in the wispy tradition like The Chromatics. Their self-titled album on local imprint Fast Weapons is a peek into a ghostly love story. It’s smoky and breezy, but doesn’t lose its center as a pop record. Sentimental synth melodies uphold the tragic and triumphant croons from Jean, who holds the material together with sweet coos and more authoritative choruses that hint at the diva she’s got under their cool surface. - VAN PHAM

Marcus Fischer __ marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com
Marcus Fischer is a craftsman in the field of sound and vision, a devotee of experiential performances that are likely influenced by his background for visual language. His ambient compositions are lovely, sweeping works that unfurl slowly and deliberately with touching results, a direct tunnel back to the proverbial womb as an ideal safe harbor for instances of synesthetic musical experiences — glowing, radiant pieces that are gentle in sound and sprawling in scope. Although slow, creeping, and what some might call uneventful, it’s reinvigorating in its assured calm and immersive qualities. Special note about the track featured here, from Bandcamp: “This set was centered around lapharp and non-computer-based signal processing which was fed into a 25 foot long tape loop strung from floor to celling in the event space. In addition to the tape being a recording and looping medium, it was also part of a feedback and delay system which was controlled from the mixer.” - VAN PHAM

Tunnels __ www.soundcloud.com/tunnelsportland
When Eternal Tapestry’s Nick Bindeman isn’t shredding guitars with his quintet of psych compatriots, he’s navigating a much calmer but equally outer limits-reaching frequency with his solo work under the moniker Tunnels. With dizzying arpeggio synth arrangements alongside sparse, driving drum machine rhythms, Tunnels’ songs are cosmos-gazing music (some with dark vocal intonations that channel a bit of Suicide and Gary Numan, making any listen your own personal astral cabaret). Some of his latest Soundcloud material reveals a bit more instrumental introspection — thick with synthsplorations fit for fans of Tangerine Dream and Laurie Spiegel. It swells up and bows back, scintillates and oscillates in sound that’s surfing the great divide between this dimension and the next. Sounds like a pathway, straight to your center and concurrently out to the universe. - VAN PHAM

Houndstooth __ houndstooth.bandcamp.com
Mr. John Gnorski (formerly of Inside Voices, now of Houndstooth) has really succeeded in musically distilling the particular regional mythology of our Pacific Northwest. He’s at the helm of a new rock group with his sweetie Katie Bernstein, with songs that feel just like that cozy flannel you wear like a uniform in this Northwest weather – such kicked back and comfortable grooves, that can draw from both grunge and Americana with equal ease. Moody love songs for rainy days, lush like green forests. - GINA ALTAMURA

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Portland Musicians To Watch: Holocene’s 2012 Year-End Picks

SEE FULL REVIEW

Like its namesake, the film was not entirely one thing, but fully engaging as a combination of several features: live storytelling, illustrative media, and apt, adept scoring. Green’s charismatic personality made for a magnetic narration – funny, quick-witted, with an underlying poignancy that he’s undoubtedly developed over his own career that’s spanned a roster of documentaries like the Oscar-nominated chronicle of the radical late ‘60s group, The Weather Underground, as well as a similarly-scoped “live documentary” called Utopia in Four Movements, that was performed at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

The dreamy noise-pop of band Yo La Tengo was a perfect blanket for the audience to lay on and marvel at the film’s figure and his on-screen ephemera. The trio is no stranger to scores, having provided soundtracks to works like the undersea landscapes of surrealist French director Jean Painlevé. The jump seems only natural, to move from sonic illustrations of alien waters to adding color and dimension to quirky relics from Fuller’s abundant life. Their Mark Mothersbaugh-esque melody for the documentary’s opening sequence – images of a geodesic dome in flight – laid the sweet-but-slightly-kooky groundwork for the touching, strange, and extraordinary voyage that the audience is led through for the duration of the film.

We were introduced to Fuller’s incredible “Dymaxion Chronofile” – the largest collection of personal files belonging to any human being in history. Dymaxion is a Fuller vocabulary favorite, a combination of “dynamic”, “maximum”, and “tension”, and what a better way to describe a painstaking collection of every document that the man had ever come in contact with over the course of 63 years? The cycling through of these artifacts, comprised of notes, sketches, bills, film reels, clippings, etc., made the presentation more like a PowerPoint or TED talk, rather than a simple theater outing. It’s worth saying that the program itself was short — less than an hour — which stands in contrast to Fuller’s tendency to speak for hours on end (he once delivered a 42-hour lecture, humbly titled “Everything I Know”). In that time, we see the origin of Fuller’s quest to enact change (sparked by the tragic loss of his young daughter), the boom and bust of his various innovative endeavors, and his rise to relative fame for his uncomplicated but salient vision of almost utopian, sustainable living. Green led the audience through a timeline of various ups and downs, including moments of doubt in which Fuller doesn’t appear to be as iconoclastic as one might hope. Green scans through the files, the film, and plays some archival footage alongside some interviews that create a loose sketch of the figure that is Fuller.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Fuller is that he didn’t “achieve” much by common standards. He is mostly known for the design of the geodesic dome, which has well contributed to the field of architectural design but did not have the far-reaching effects that he had hoped for. We’re not all shacked up in domes, and our skylines are still primarily straight lines to the heavens. He was, however, a creature intensely convicted that an individual could enact palpable change in the world, and become indefatigable exemplification of the human spirit and willpower. The myth of the man was not necessarily in his actions (and in fact his resume includes a number of fantastic failures and near or total disasters), but in his ideas for sustainability and service that continue to have relevance in our world today – and that in itself is an accomplishment. It’s hard to imagine not being somewhat seduced by the mythos surrounding Fuller after his story was filtered through the thoughtful, affecting handling of Green and his musical collaborators. The tender oeuvre, in itss brief but touching run, was an elating practice in examining the extraordinary life of a man and the potential of his ideas.

Radio Documentary Series

The Green World Of R. Buckminster Fuller Film Trailer

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Brainstorm – “Flat Earth”

Urick kicked off the night with his contribution of songs based on edits of African songs that were sourced from YouTube. They were paired with time-warped videos arranged by Kirkley, who also sources much from the video site to weave his revisions. The resulting meditations were an amuse-bouche for the senses — light, airy, dream-like suspensions of hacked-up vocals, altogether reaping the unlikely benefits of YouTube’s imperfections. Distortion, compression, and murkiness added to the aged, second-hand quality that comprises the charm of many foreign recordings.

The evening went on to include live music, in a trio of performances crafted for the event. Nigerian guitarist, Mdou Moctar, performing via Skype (a special session recorded for this event), was the torch-bearer for the original source material that sparked the impetus for the evening: raw, engaging music from West Africa. His hypnotic guitar work, aided in part by the warped quality of the broadcast, recalled the faraway, heat-stroked sweep of the Sahara.

LIVE SHOW REVIEW CONTINUED BELOW
Mdou Moctar and Brainstorm conversing via Skype, four months before the TBA Show

Mdou Moctar – “Anar” Music Video (Directed by Christopher Kirkley)

The buzz of Moctar’s song whet the audience’s appetite for Brainstorm’s set of upbeat songs turned Tuareg (a term used to classify the nomadic people of North Africa and their culture) on its head for new audiences, through covers and their own original material inspired by the style. Brainstorm’s treatment of Moctar’s songs retained the melodic integrity of the originals but lent them a glossier, updated, and triumphant sound, their trio of instrumentation filling out the sparse source material with spastic percussion and bold group vocals. Moctar’s “Tahoultine” and “Anar” became Brainstorm’s “The Devil Cannot Wait” and “Vanessa,” respectively — the results of the band’s homophonic translation of Moctar’s song lyrics. Brainstorm delivered this style with aplomb and bombast, a natural move for a band whose work is already evocative of warmer climates.

Listen to Brainstorm’s Mdou Moctar Covers

The night’s closer, Iftin Band, featured members who are quite literally heirs to the super sound from Somalia (keyboard player Yasir Shankar’s father and uncle were in the original lineup, of whom we were shown clips via Youtube). The finale was an appropriate alliance of the performances and clips that preceded them. It seemed an amalgamation of old world style fused with new generation sensibilities. The steady beat of Axmed Xaji Weli’s congas ran beneath the Yahama-driven synth work provided by Shankar, creating, in sum, the funky songs (and the only ones that got some of the crowd actually moving during the night) that comprised their set. It lacked the big band sound that previous iterations of the band might’ve had, but it was a good primer, and a sweet testimonial to the draw of this music.

And although at first the onslaught of media seemed to demand much from the audience in its three-pronged approach, the quickly scrolling, scanning nature of the two outer screens created a magical juxtaposition with what was often in the center: long, simple, and even if imperfect, footage of the art we owed the night to, the vibrancy and allure of African music and its performers. Even the new footage of Moctar, in all its graininess and somewhat warped sound, recalls a sort of faraway place for which we might have little context but compellingly desire to know.

BRAINSTORM TOUR DATES
# = with Dinosaur Feathers and Shark?
9/25 BOISE @ Neurolux — Radio Boise Tuesday w/ Ringo Deathstarr
9/27 FORT COLLINS, CO @ GNU Experience Gallery
9/28 DENVER @ Lion’s Lair
9/30 LAWRENCE, KS @ Jackpot Saloon
10/2 CHICAGO, IL @ The Burlington
10/3 CHATTANOOGA, TN @ JJ’s Bohemia
10/4 ASHEVILLE, NC @ The Get Down
10/5 RALEIGH, NC @ King’s Barricade #
10/6 GREENVILLE, NC @ Tipsy Teapot #
10/7 CHARLOTTE, NC @ Snug Harbor #
10/8 ROANOKE, VA @ The Shelf House #
10/9 CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA @ Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar #
10/10 WASHINGTON DC @ Black Cat Backstage #
10/11 PHILADELPHIA @ Goldilock’s Gallery #
10/12 BALTIMORE, MD @ Golden West Cafe #
10/13 BROOKLYN, NY @ Shea Stadium #
10/14 RED HOOK, NY @ Bard College
10/16-10/19 CMJ Music Fest
10/18 BROOKLYN, NY @ Muchmores (CMJ Music Fest)
10/21 BLOOMINGTON, IN @ The Bishop
10/22 FAYETTEVILLE, AR @ Nightbird Books
10/23 DENTON, TX @ Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios
10/24 AUSTIN, TX @ The Mohawk w/ Dignan Porch
10/25 MARFA, TX @ El Cosmico
10/26 SANTA FE, NM @ Betterday Coffee
10/27 TUSCON, AZ @ Club Congress Block Party
10/28 SAN DIEGO, CA @ Bar Eleven
10/29 LOS ANGELES, CA @ The Satellite — Free show
10/30 SANTA BARBARA @ Muddy Waters Coffee House w/ Little Owl
10/31 FRESNO, CA @ Fulton 55
11/1 SAN FRANCISCO, CA @ The Knockout
11/3 SACRAMENTO, CA @ Bows and Arrows w/ Appetite

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