Protest Projections with Robin Bell

Name: On-Location Photography: DC’s Public Sculpture and Architecture
Start: 2018-9-8T10-10-00-00
End: 2018-9-22T13-13-00-00
Location: S. Dillon Ripley Center

Brandon WetherbeeMay 10, 2018ArtBYT Radio

ArtBYT Radio 31 min read

Robin Bell is a visual artist working on the facades of building. His work appears live for minutes at a time. It lives on via social media forever.

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💩💩💩 Sh*thole Projection on Trump Hotel #Resist 💩💩💩

A post shared by Robin Bell (@bellvisuals) on Jan 13, 2018 at 7:39pm PST

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08sep(sep 8)10:00 am22(sep 22)1:00 pmOn-Location Photography: DC’s Public Sculpture and Architecture10:00 am (8) - 1:00 pm (22) S. Dillon Ripley Center

17sep(sep 17)10:15 am05nov(nov 5)1:00 pmIntroduction to Watercolor10:15 am (17) - (november 5) 1:00 pm S. Dillon Ripley Center

20sep7:00 pmCar Seat Headrest - First Night Sold Out! Second Night Added!w/ Naked Giants, Don Babylon7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.

Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over “Famous Prophets,” making out to ‘Cute Thing’, dancing their asses off as ‘Bodys’ climbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feel everything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He’s trusting you – plural you, thousands of you – with the things he can’t say out loud. ” I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends,” he sings – and then, caught between truths, backtracks: ” I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.”

You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. Twin Fantasy is not a monologue. Twin Fantasy is a conversation. You know, he sings, that I’m mostly singing about you. This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter: he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.

“It was never a finished work,” Toledo says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.

It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Toledo, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those ” apologies to future me’s and you’s,” there is more forgiveness than fury.

This, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.

He’s not alone no more.

Time

(Thursday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$25

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20sep7:00 pm9:00 pmFree Weekly Bingo w/ Union Market7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Union Market

20sep7:00 pmThe Buttertonesw/ Wild Wing7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

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Last year the Buttertones put out Gravedigging, but on their newest Midnight In A Moonless Dream, they’re digging deeper and discovering something dark. If Gravedigging felt like an oversaturated spaghetti-western desertscape, Midnight is much more biting—music made for the swampland that spit out Australia’s mad Scientists, or for the Mickey Spillane night city where the Cramps met all those garbagemen and werewolves. Or maybe the Buttertones are heading for an even more primal place: “Show more teeth / Bite your way in,” sings guitarist Richard Araiza. “You’re back in the jungle again!”

They’d started in 2011 as a trio of music-school misfits. Araiza, bassist Sean Redman and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Modesto ‘Cobi’ Cobiån all wanted to pursue something more than boring industry adequacy, and soon locked together their current five-piece line-up with sax player London Guzman and guitarist Dakota Boettcher. With Gravedigging, they leapt from backyard parties to back-to-back tours, including their first trip to Europe, and scored a Coachella slot for 2018. It was a year that made them sharper, stronger, even more sophisticated. And when they were ready to record, they were ready to do things differently.

Midnight was made in two flash sessions at Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio with Gravedigging producer Jonny Bell, whose genre-smashing record collection and appetite for experimentation made for a perfect match. (He’s really a guru, they say.) What was supposed to be a six song EP during the summer of 2017 bloomed into a full-length by the end of that December. Midnight was like a trust fall, the band says—leap of faith after leap of faith, cut to tape as it happened by a tight and tour-tested band. On this album, they’d decided, everything would be new—not just new sounds, like their first-ever string section, but new ways of working together and writing together. They worked on trust and instinct, by feeling instead of thinking. If it worked, they’d keep it, and if it didn’t, they’d burn it and move on. Gravedigging played like the soundtrack to a good heist movie, but Midnight was like the true story itself—a perfect and intricate crime, executed by a crew of professionals under cover of night.

On the vicious “Winks and Smiles,” the spirit of sax and violence that powered cult-classic L.A. punkers the Deadbeats suddenly comes to life; on the starked-out “You and Your Knife” and fog-and-smoke follow-up “Brickhead,” you’ll hear the cryptic echoes of Suicide or Bauhaus. It’s music made for dancers but also for doomed romancers, and you’ll hear it best on the pocket symphony “Eros,” which closes the album with Lynch-ian vision and power—here Araiza sings with almost startling passion, and if you don’t linger on the idea of graveyard angels in perpetual embrace, it’s a love song for the ages. This is the strong stuff, the kind that comes in an unmarked bottle and burns when it hits.

“It’s the darkness that brings us together,” laughs Guzman—in person, this is a band who prefer comedy to tragedy, even if they do claim to spend hours listening to Smiths records all day. But there’s still a tension and even a sinister new dimension on Midnight that the Buttertones never quite had before. Like lead single “C4,” which ignites like something from a New York no-wave song, with slashing sax and ferocious drums and a piano riff falling of a cliff before Araiza fights through the noise and gunsmoke, and what’s the very first word on the whole album? “Bang!” he shouts—and that says it all.

Time

(Thursday) 7:00 pm

Location

U Street Music Hall

1115 U Street NW Washington, DC, 20009

Cost

$15

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21sep5:30 pm6:30 pmNats Night Out5:30 pm - 6:30 pm Due South

21sep6:00 pmGary Numan - The Second Savage North American Tourw/ Nightmare Air6:00 pm 9:30 Club

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In a castle in the San Fernando Valley lies the lair of music icon Gary Numan. Outside is an enormous statue of a dragon, inside a St Bernard (almost as large) greets you on arrival. He’s a new addition to the family – a rescue pup, and huge. The lord of this manor could be as outwardly intimidating as this entire set-up, but he’s a humble presence. Notorious for hits such as ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ and ‘Cars’, Numan’s early career was too often misconstrued, tainted by a sometimes fraught relationship with the media and challenged by the hostility of the music industry at the time, still deeply committed as it was to the guitar, bass, drums approach of old. Numan, however, stuck to his guns, outlasted his naysayers, and became renowned not just as a pioneer but as an institution. Today, with a career that has spanned nearly four decades, his approach to electronic music remains an inspiration to artists across genres and eras, from stadium goliaths such as Depeche Mode, Prince and Nine Inch Nails to alternative heroes such as Beck, Damon Albarn and Marilyn Manson. Even Kanye West owes him a debt and David Bowie once credited him with ‘writing two of the finest songs’ in British music. It’s no surprise he recently received the Ivor Novello Award for Inspiration.

Now, Numan is preparing his 22nd studio album titled ‘ Savage (Songs From A Broken World)’. He’s a busy guy. A self-proclaimed “one man band”, Numan has always been something of an outlier living on his own terms. These days he manages himself, so has to balance being the artist with all manner of other duties; booking shows, designing flyers, endless scheduling. A mark of overcoming that challenge is currently slightly red and raised on his forearms. The lyrics of the new album’s opening track ‘Ghost Nation’ are now tattooed there, a reminder of the past 18 months of writing and recording in a studio at the side of his garden.

Numan moved to LA five years ago with his wife Gemma and three daughters. He’s originally a West London, Hammersmith boy – born Gary Webb. His father drove buses at Heathrow Airport and, with his mother (who sadly passed away in 2016), bought him his first acoustic guitar at the age of five, kickstarting his obsession with music, and sound inparticular. “I had tiny little hands but I learnt a few chords and could strum very badly,” he recalls. Music was one of two obsessions. The other being machines, specifically airplanes and racing cars. The fascination with both machinery and music left the young Numan unsure of a specific future path, but he knew he wanted to do something that would be challenging, constantly evolving and take him around the world. He wanted something endlessly adventurous.

School was a troubled time unfortunately and he was expelled from multiple places due to bad behaviour. In machinery and music though he found a comfort zone. “Music became the thing I most wanted to do,” he says, “and school became just a huge wall in the way.” That was something that made a lot more sense to him once he’d discovered that he had Asperger’s Syndrome. As he talks today he explains that he’s “socially incompetent” and “terrible at eye contact.” He has a five second rule for that. “If I look at someone for more than five seconds I’m probably being too intense. If I look at them for less than three seconds I think I give the impression that I’m not showing enough interest. So I’m counting all the time while I’m talking. It’s hard work.” He laughs. “Interacting with people is, for me, just a series of rapid calculations, and worry.”

Expelled from school before sitting any exams and so leaving with no qualifications, Gary decided to forge a career in music while punk was all the rage. “Punk to me was a means to an end. It wasn’t what I wanted to be doing long term.” Nevertheless he started a punk outfit called Tubeway Army and signed to Beggars Banquet in early 1978. In the studio while making their debut self titled album a life changing moment took place, Gary discovered a Moog synthesizer in the control room and started experimenting with it. He reinterpreted all the punk songs he’d initially written and over the three day session turned them into pseudo-electronic numbers. After a huge argument with the Beggars Banquet label owners about this collosal change of direction, they eventually deferred to Numan and, to their credit (and good fortune), released those revamped electronic songs instead of making him re-record the punk album they’d signed him to make. The follow-up record ‘Replicas’ contained ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ which went to Number 1. Then came the whirlwind. Three Number 1 albums in succession. Two world tours. All within a year.

“It came good so quickly but I didn’t feel vindicated by it. I was absolutely trampled by the speed of it,” says Numan. “It was like standing in front of a fast moving train. I was on my own, same as now, but with no experience whatsoever. I had no meaningful guidance. I’d only ever done a handful of shows in tiny little clubs. All of a sudden you’re Number 1, the press are comparing you to these megastar legends and you’ve only been there for what felt like two minutes. I was overwhelmed, beaten up. I felt like I was fighting for my life.”

Resistance to this new kind of music, and Numan inparticular, from some parts of the music business establishment was considerable, even the Musicians Union tried to ban him, claiming he was putting real musicians out of work, “How insulting is that?” He laughs. “It was an entirely new form of music and it caught a lot of people out,” he explains. Already existing underground electro artists were equally annoyed that Numan received success before them. Guitar bands, on the other hand, derided him for not making “proper music”. “I never really understood why it was as hostile as it was. All I’d really done was written some songs that a lot of people liked.” he says. “Luckily attitudes changed and things got better, eventually.”

After the Number 1 successes of his albums ‘Replicas’,’The Pleasure Principle’ and ‘Telekon’, he played three Wembley Arena shows in 1981 and then intended to retire from touring to concentrate more on studio work and developing his songwriting skills, although not before flying around the world in his own aeroplane, including an incident in India were he was arrested on suspicion of smuggling and spying. “That was interesting” he says. Musically though the career spotlight had become a monster and Numan a recluse. “Fame makes you a target for every disenchanted idiot with a grudge”. Music went from being a hobby to a huge global nightmare, “You couldn’t escape from it. I was entirely unprepared for the extreme reactions from the media and the public, both good and bad, and I found all of it frightening. It took me a long time to even start to get used to it.” All that’s changed now of course, as there’s a tremendous amount of respect for Numan. At the time however, after ‘retiring’, it all started to slip away. He found himself getting sucked into bad decisions. “I was releasing an album a year, every year,” he says. “But it was getting worse. The success was sliding, album sales were going down, ticket sales were going down, I started to panic and I made that fatal mistake of listening to advice, and so I lost my way. I started to make music born out of career desperation and other people’s opinions rather than my own artistic satisfaction, a horrible period.”

All changed in the early ’90s. Numan stopped listening to other people, and started listening to one significant person – his new wife Gemma. She convinced him to get back to his initial appeal, to stop hiding behind other players and other singers. “Gemma managed to make me understand, after a lot of arguing, that I’d progressively taken out the Gary Numan part of my sound because of my lack of confidence. I didn’t like my voice or my playing, I had no confidence at all.” he says. “The “’Sacrifice’ album in ’94 was a genuine return to doing it for the love of it. Not trying to revitalise a career, not thinking commercially. I’d given up to be honest, things had got so bad that I thought it was all over and so I went back to doing it for a hobby. I had no idea if ‘Sacrifice’ would even get released. I had no record deal at the time and it looked unlikely I’d ever get another one.” When the album was self-released in 1994 on his own label, Numan’s career was simultaneously being reappraised by the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Saint Etienne and Damon Albarn. “I see influence both coming to me and from me like sparks,” he says. “People will see that spark and it’ll ignite their own ideas. We are all triggered by something else.” Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor it’s said listened to ‘Telekon’ when making the classic ‘Downward Spiral’ album. “I listened but I can’t hear it,” Gary laughs. “I would never have known. That’s a brilliant use of influence, to turn it into something entirely your own.” He adds “Luckily that wave of new interest in me came at a time when I’d got my songwriting back up to a good standard. A year or two earlier would have been a disaster as I was still lost then.”

Numan had become part of the zeitgeist again. Later on he’d be sampled by Basement Jaxx (‘Where’s Your Head At’) and The Sugababes (on their huge Number one hit ‘Freak Like Me’). “That ‘Freak Like Me’ song,” he says. “I was really proud of the fact that 25 years after I had written that music it still sounded cool and current.” His experience throughout the ’90s gave Numan the confidence to be hellbent on never pandering to radio or to A&Rs or industry trends. He is staunchly independent. It’s something even today’s young breakthrough acts can look to for inspiration.

Fast-forward to 2017 and he’s taking the exact same attitude forward in his songwriting now. Numan’s past few albums have been much heavier and darker. Interestingly electronic music has now become the sound of the masses due to the availability of cheaper technology at home. Anyone can make music now, which Numan finds liberating and thrilling. “Everyone should have an opportunity and not be thwarted by needing expensive equipment. Those with talent will still rise above.” he says. Carrying a recorder with him wherever he goes, his inspiration is sound, atmosphere, the wider world. There’s a recording from the London Underground on one of the new tracks, such was Numan’s obsession with a particular noise a train made on a recent visit to London.

Lyrically, however, the material for ‘Savage’ wasn’t obvious at first. When Numan released his last album – 2013’s highly acclaimed ‘Splinter’ – he had a deep well of real-life inspiration to draw from: a three year period of severe depression and family turmoil. This time around he went far more conceptual. As a child, Numan wrote short stories, influenced by Philip K Dick and William Burroughs. He was consumed by science fiction – “or epic fantasy” –, always fantasising about how civilisation might look in the near future and what the human race could become. His 1979 album ‘Replicas’ focused on that, but since then all of these ideas have been relegated to a novel that Numan describes as “never-ending”. He began to lift ideas from that novel to inform this record.

‘Savage’ is set in a post global warming, apocalyptic, Earth in the not-too-distant future. There is no technology left and most of the planet has turned to a desolate, desert wasteland. Food is scarce, water even more so and human kindness and decency are just a dim and distant memory. Western and Eastern cultures have merged, more because of the need to simply survive than any feelings of greater tolerance or understanding. It’s a harsh, savage environment, as are the survivors who still roam across it.

While he was writing the record, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. It made sense to make him and his climate decisions the catalyst for the apocalypse theme of the album. “The songs are about the things that people do in such a harsh and terrifying environment. It’s about a desperate need to survive and they do awful things in order to do so, and some are haunted by what they’ve done. That desire to be forgiven, along with some discovered remnants of an old religious book, ultimately encourages religion to resurface, and it really goes downhill from there.”

Made partly in his own studio in LA, and partly in the UK, the album was produced by long-time collaborator Ade Fenton. He also set up a Pledge Music campaign to create an experience for fans that would let them see how an album was put together from first note to the finished shrink wrapped package. A strategy that brought Numan closer to his fans, and allowed him to communicate the blood, sweat and tears that goes into making a record. “I find every album I make to be more difficult than the one before,” he says. “It’s like climbing a mountain, and it gets ever steeper. I wanted people to understand what it takes, how hard it can be, the emotional roller coaster that is part and parcel of doing this, and that it can be a real battle, with yourself as much as anything. Confidence comes and goes and you can be your own worst eneny at times.”

With ’93’s ‘Splinter’ album having received the best reviews he’d ever had (not to mention the best chart position he’d had in 30 years), the pressure was on to beat it. “I don’t want to repeat myself,” says Numan. “People who have been around for a long time often tend to bland out a bit and become more middle of the road, or they hide in nostalgia and live on the back of what they did before. Both of those options are awful. Being proud of your legacy is one thing, but becoming trapped by it is another thing entirely. I’m not one for self praise but I am very proud of the fact that as I’ve got to the more precarious latter part of my career the music’s got progressively darker and even less radio friendly. I’ve done the opposite of playing it safe.”

Time

(Friday) 6:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$30

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21sep6:00 pmPortugal. The ManLucius6:00 pm Merriweather Post Pavilion

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Everything You Need To Know About Portugal. The Man’s New Album.

Well, we’re two full months into 2017 and the world continues to burn like an avalanche of flaming biohazard material sliding down a mountain of used needles into a canyon full of rat feces. But hey, it’s not all bad: Portugal. The Man has a new album coming out called Woodstock.

PTM’s last album came out over three years ago—a long gap for a band who’ve dropped roughly an album a year since 2006. And in true, prolific band fashion, they’ve spent almost every minute since 2013 working on an album called Gloomin Doomin. They created a shit-ton of individual songs, but as a whole, none of them hung together in a way that felt right. Then John Gourley, PTM’s lead singer, made a trip home to Wasilla, Alaska, (Home of Portugal. The Man’s biggest fan, Sarah Palin) and two things happened that completely changed the album’s trajectory.

First, John got some parental tough love from his old man, who called John on the proverbial carpet or dogsled or whatever you put people on when you want to yell at them in Alaska. “What’s taking so long to finish the album?” John’s dad said. “Isn’t that what bands do? Write songs and then put them out?” Like fathers and unlicensed therapists tend to do, John’s dad cut him deep. The whole thing started John thinking about why the band seemed to be stuck on a musical elliptical machine from hell and, more importantly, about how to get off of it.

Second, fate stuck its wiener in John’s ear again when he found his dad’s ticket stub from the original 1969 Woodstock music festival. It seems like a small thing, but talking to his dad about Woodstock ’69 knocked something loose in John’s head. He realized that, in the same tradition of bands from that era, Portugal. The Man needed to speak out about the world crumbling around them. With these two ideas converging, the band made a seemingly bat-shit-crazy decision: they took all of the work they had done for the three years prior and they threw it out.

It wasn’t easy and there was the constant threat that the band’s record label might have them killed, but the totally insane decision paid off. With new, full-on, musical boners, the band went back to the studio—working with John Hill (In The Mountain In The Cloud), Danger Mouse (Evil Friends), Mike D (Everything Cool), and longtime collaborator Casey Bates (The one consistent producer since the first record). In this new-found creative territory, the album that became Woodstock rolled out naturally from there

Remember that mountain of burning needles we were talking about? Good. Because Woodstock is an album (Including the new single “Feel It Still”) that—with optimism and heart—points at the giant pile and says, “Hey, this pile is fucked up!” And if you think that pile is fucked up too, you owe it to yourself—hell, to all of us—to get out there and do something about it.

Fronted by the enchanting Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, and backed by their counterpart bandmates Dan Molad and Pete Lalish, Lucius have drawn acclaim for powerful songs showcasing taut hooks, along with their mesmerizing stage presence and bold visual aesthetics. The New York Times described Wolfe and Laessig’s vocals as being “especially gorgeous,” while Rolling Stone says Lucius is “powerful enough to knock you over.” The band released their second album, Good Grief in 2016, and much like their debut album Wildewoman, it earned them high praise from influential critics such as Pitchfork, NPR, Rolling Stone and The Guardian.

Aesthetically, while their resemblance onstage seems uncanny with matching outfits and hairstyles, offstage, they don’t bear the same resemblance at all. When Lucius takes the stage, what you see and hear is two voices coalescing into one stressing, agile sound. They sing in an arresting unison, doubling their high, clear voices and creating a third sound that is as unnerving as it is lovely, like two mirrors, creating an infinite number of reflections that reveal as much as they obscure. The band’s distinctive play on duality showcases Jess and Holly’s powerful voices at the center, bolstered and surrounded by the mathematically precise drumming of Dan with the graceful chiming of Pete’s guitar. Together the quartet create a sound the New Yorker calls “seemingly impossible with flawless grace that brings delicate beauty to even the most bombastic moments.”

Since 2017, Jess and Holly hold duties, contributing what Rolling Stone describes as “sweet, soulful, and smothering” vocals to Roger Waters mammoth arena-conquering Us Them tour, performing over 160 shows around the world.

And yet 2018 finds Lucius together for an intimate sold out acoustic tour and the release of an accompanying 10-track acoustic album, NUDES. A collection of songs chosen specifically to showcase their soulful, powerful voices and gorgeous harmonies, NUDES includes three new songs, four from the band’s back catalog, and three covers. The album also features sit-ins from Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters (on “Goodnight Irene”) and Wilco’s Nels Cline (on “Million Dollar Secret”).

Time

(Friday) 6:00 pm

Location

Merriweather Post Pavilion

10475 Little Patuxent Parkway Columbia, Maryland, 21044

Cost

$45 – $75

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21sep7:00 pmCarl Broemel of My Morning Jacketw/ Steelism7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

Protest Projections with Robin Bell

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7-Session Daytime Course

Monday, September 17 to November 5, 2018 – 10:15 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

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