WREK – Rad/ATL

January 6, 2024January 25, 2024 RadATL Uncategorized

Radfest returns! Friday, January 19 at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery

Radfest is back after a three-year Global pandemic hiatus! RadATL’s founder celebrates one more year around the sun, this time at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery on Friday, January 19.

This year’s show features performances by seven post-punk, post-hardcore, and pure noise greats spread across two stages.

Athens-based cassette label \\NULL|ZØNE// gets the party started with a showcase of Georgia-bred noise acts including x.nte, Grant Evans (of Quiet Nights), and label boss Michael Potter’s own project The Electric Nature. Each act is cranking our short, powerful sets that challenge the traditional notions of what music is, and what it can be. Potter has been on the frontier of this scene for a long time, and it’s been far too long since his last Atlanta appearance, so it’s great to have him back.

Gebidan marks its live debut. The recently founded four-piece features Mike Patton of Orange County’s late ‘70s hardcore outfit Middle Class. The group is often hailed as the first North American hardcore act EVER. Patton’s musical resume also includes time spent playing with Jack from TSOL in the band Cathedral of Tears. He was also in Eddie And The Subtitles, and Trotsky Icepick. But really, check out his credentials on Discogs to see that he worked as a producer and backup vocalist on the Adolescents’ self-titled “blue album.” He also produced the Minutemen’s “Joy” single, along with a handful of other Minutemen releases.

Patton lives in Georgia these days and is singing and playing bass with the new outfit. Gebidan’s first recordings find the group embracing a more abstract, psychedelic take on indie and alternative rock songwriting. Great stuff!

WREK 91.1 FM’s “Destroy All Music” co-host and bass player Tony Gordon teams up with guitarist Curtis Stephens for tONY cURTIS. Together, they create a scrapping, smoldering grind of earth rattling textures. Gordon (also of FREEBASS, Zandosis, and Charlie Parker fame) is well aware of the power of subtlety, especially when it’s blasted at maximum volume. The 11 numbers that make up their latest release tc2 lull the ears and the brain into a meditative state by commanding a deeper level of ecstatic listening. Beyond rhythm, beyond melody, and beyond the drone lie the pure sonic textures of steel strings, and they are teeming with abstract beauty and limitless possibilities for the imagination.

Whiphouse brings a high-energy and death-afflicted punk dirge to the stage. It’s one of my favorite new bands to emerge from these parts in quite some time. Lots of homies in this group! Michael Keenan, Mike Bison-Beavers, Debbie Beat, Stanley Jackson, and one of my favorite former interns Kelly Stroup! It’s just an awesome assemblage of people tearing up on stage the only way they know how.

Loud Humans close out the show. More info. coming soon.

This is an ALL AGES SHOW! Doors open at 7 p.m. $10 gets you in. Fri., Jan. 19. 515 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd. Park in the lot across the street if the side street and front lot are full.

Thanks to this year’s sponsors! Eyedrum, Topo Chico, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Record Plug Magazine, The Tight Bros. Network, and to Dain Johnson who created this year’s magnificent flyer.

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January 24, 2022March 26, 2022 RadATL Podcasts & Interviews

R.I.P. Tom Smith, Jon Kincaid, and Robert Cheatham

REST IN PEACE: Tom Smith (on the far left, with Frank “Rat Bastard” Falestra). Photo by Chad Radford. Jon Kincaid (center) photo courtesy Amy Potter. Robert Cheatham (right) photo by Tara-Lynne Pixley.

There’s an old African proverb that says: “When a person dies, a library burns to the ground.”

Point being, when someone dies a lifetime of knowledge, experience, and context is lost forever, and the world is left a poorer place in their absence.

In January, Atlanta music quietly suffered through three profound deaths: First, news spread that Jon Kincaid, longtime 91.1 FM / WREK DJ and host of Sunday nights’ “Personality Crisis” radio show had died on January 4. He was 57 years old.

A week later, On Jan. 11, word spread across social media that former Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery Executive Director and avant-garde music and art scenes fixture Robert Cheatham had died at the age of 73.

Another week later, post-punk journeyman and noise music provocateur Tom Smith died as well. He was 66 years old. All three men represented somewhat different but primary eras and enclaves of Atlanta music. And while it may not be immediately obvious, each of their respective influences played an indelible role in shaping the city’s musical identity.

For more than 30 years, Kincaid hosted “Personality Crisis,” giving a platform to countless fledgling alternative rock, post-punk, underground, and Southern rock luminaries. In the early days of their careers, Atlanta-based acts the Indigo Girls, Drivin’ N Cryin’, and countless others benefitted from his steadfast dedication to music, and his encyclopedic knowledge.

Check out the backside of Mission of Burma’s 1988 LP Forget, and you’ll see bass player Roger Miller sporting a WREK T-shirt. It’s a good bet that Jon had a hand in Roger owning that shirt.

Jon explored every type of music known to humankind through his work as a WREK music director, and by creating his own experimental music under the name Sequence 3.

Cheatham led Eyedrum through its defining eras; he was Executive Director when the venerable arts institution was awarded a $30,000 grant from the Warhol Foundation in 2006. Cheatham also hosted Eyedrum’s long-running open improv nights, which became an institution for outsider and experimental arts. His band Tinnitus was well known for cranking out squelching, heavily-amplified noise and feedback created with the expressed intention of driving everyone out of the room.

His Brahvar Large Ensemble would often corral as many musicians together as possible — once even crowding more than 20 performers onto the tiny stage in the basement of Eyedrum’s original Trinity Ave. location for a massive improv blowout. Connections were made, new ensembles were formed, and wholly new configurations of musicians perpetuated the community. Cheatham’s brilliance lied in his merger of skronking, careening free jazz, and untethered exploration of sound as art without restraint.

Tom Smith reveled in a more confrontational aesthetic. With his groups To Live and Shave in LA, Peach of Immortality, and Boat Of, he placed elements of noise, the avant-garde, and sleazy rock ‘n’ roll on a level playing field. He wove them together seamlessly, while hopping around the globe — from Atlanta to Washington D.C. and finally Hanover, Germany. Along the way, he amassed collaborations with everyone from Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Andrew WK, Harry Pussy, Bill Orcutt, and more.

Kincaid, Cheatham, and Smith were all driven to create by exploring, not just rest on the past. Their sense of creativity, their dynamism, and their willingness to open up to the new — and the old — left a lasting mark on the city. Atlanta was made richer by their presence and their contributions, and the world suffers a tremendous loss with each of their passing.

On Fri., Feb. 18 (3-9 p.m.) and Sat., Feb. 19 (1-9 p.m.) Gallery 378 (378 Clifton Rd. in Candler Park) will host a two-day celebration of Jon Kincaid’s life and history at WREK. Video installations featuring broadcasts from “Personality Crisis” and more from the WREK archives will be playing throughout the gallery. On Saturday night, several acts including the Nightporters, the Chant, Kevn Kinney and friends, Current Rage, Will Rogers, and more will take turns playing songs on the stage downstairs.

Read more in the February issue of Record Plug Magazine.

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September 4, 2020September 6, 2020 RadATL New music, Podcasts & Interviews

Past Now Tomorrow unleashes new recordings by Whispers Of Night and Suarez + Araim + Shirley

WHISPERS OF NIGHT: Majid Araim (left) and Ben Shirley. Photo by Ryan Beddingfield.

Two new releases that bear the mark of Past Now Tomorrow were by no means created as companion pieces. But Whispers Of Night’s The Dead Blessing, and the Leo Suarez + Majid Araim + Ben Shirley trio’s voice resolve are forever bound by time, place, physical aesthetics, and a dedication to pushing improvised music into deeper and higher plains of the imagination.

At the core of both releases stands the duo of cello player and Past Now Tomorrow label owner Ben Shirley and mandolin player Majid Araim. Together, they’ve fleshed out a singular musical voice while employing an arsenal of instruments—cello, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, harmonica, recorder, piano, reed organ, Korg MS-20, percussion, walkie talkies, tapes, and radio—to explore a haunted and wildly shifting terrain of musical timbres and colors.

“We did a crazy experiment with a process of overdubbing,” Shirley says of the Whispers Of Night release. “We improvised the initial pieces, then we started overdubbing. But only one of us wore headphones: One of us was listening to and playing along with what was already in the can. The other was responding to what was happening in the room. We traded back and forth, and a submerged musical composition rose up out of the ether as we went along,” he adds.

They recorded the sessions for The Dead Blessing using both a 4-Track and a computer. When finished, they spent weeks mixing it all together before Ben Price at Studilaroche put the final mastering touches on the five cavernous pieces presented here.

For voice resolve [sic.], Araim and Shirley teamed up with Philadelphia-based percussionist Leo Suarez to record a stripped-down early morning improv session—Shirley stuck with his cello, and Majid with a mandolin, violin, and his voice. Press play on the opening number, “Morning Of A Georgia Faun,” and the session sputters to life. The opening number’s title alone calls to mind Shirley’s former band—Faun And A Pan Flute—and Georgia native and saxophonist Marion Brown’s pastoral 1970 album Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun (ECM). Both provide heady context, and the song serves as an excellent entrypoint for the album’s lush and quietly calamitous survey of Georgia’s avant-garde landscape. The music is beautiful, abstract, and reflexive as songs such as “Let The Fish Gossip,” and “Grass So Soft” draw out tension in a subtle cacophony of sounds summoned from the depths of the subconscious minds of three players who all have their antennae dialed into the same frequencies.

GEORGIA MORNING: Leo Suarez (left) and Majid Araim. Photo by Ben Shirley.

Prior to this session, Suarez, Araim, and Shirley had jammed together sporadically while Whispers Of Night was on the road playing shows around the country. In June of 2019, after Suarez played a show at the Magic Lantern, the three reconvened at 8 a.m. to roll tape. Ofir Klemperer recorded the session as they all locked in with their instruments. Aside from one small, imperceptible cut, the session went down as is.

“We consciously chose to make the trio not Leo + Whispers, as we conceived of it as each individual bringing their own independent voice to the group, rather than any sort of specific sound,” Shirley says.

Both the Whispers Of Night and Suarez + Araim + Shirley releases live on Past Now Tomorrow’s Bandcamp page. A limited edition of 50 copies of The Dead Blessing and voice resolve on CD can be found on the Bandcamp page as well—not for long, though. The sturdy, cardboard sleeves and hand-assembled cover art brings a tactile element to music that often eludes conventional terms.
“I wanted to have a unifying aesthetic for this set of releases,” Shirley says. “I’m trying to still produce physical things, even though not many people buy them. This way I can make them at a low cost and keep the charge down. I use the least amount of plastic possible, and still have sturdy packaging with a spine on the side—working at WREK, I know that your CD is way more likely to get pulled off the shelf if it has a spine that looks interesting. That’s at least part of the idea.”