Architectual digest

Architecture in Helsinki next week, yeah yay!

One of my favourite songs of absolutely all time:

And just because, a new number for you, too.

BATALJ next week. Oh yes!!

bei Roy is hosting this event next week and the promoter has managed to secure BATALJ at the last minute. i'm so excited and i just can't hide it!

And btw: we'll be disco dancing afterwards to some seriously good djanes. Yeah that's right.

contact

just in case you ever need to contact us and you find there is no contact email on the blog (correct), go to our facebook group, where you will find both of us and from where you can contact us. :)

Preview: the week ahead (3rd Oct - 9th Oct)

Hey, are you all enjoying the weather the way we are doing? Yes? Good. The evenings are getting darker though and we spend those out on the town, where else. Here's what's catching our attention:

Monday

Rae Spoon at Silver Future: Singer-songwriter country folk tunes, reminds me strongly of early Mary Lou Lord stuff or maybe Lois. I saw him several times now and it was always great, so be sure to not miss this.

Tuesday

Eleanor Friedberger at Monarch: more singer-songwriter tunes, but this time by an American lady who also makes up 50% of The Fiery Furnaces. Her songs remind me a little of ballads sang by Chrissie Hynde. Yum.

Wednesday
Night Birds and Apostrophe at bei Roy: Night Birds = spazzy punk rock à la Shitty Limits. C* loves this kind of thing and may just spend Wednesday night dancing away in Neukölln.

Friday

Flamingo Creatures, Hering und seine sieben Sachen and Ben Butler & Mousepad at bei Roy: Ben Butler, yay!!! Since these ex-Berlinians have moved back to Scotland, I am so missing my regular Ben Butler & Mousepad fix. I'm well excited about this one. Oh yeah, and there is Flamingo Creatures (two Datashock members with their solo experimental ambient noise project, so to speak) and Hering und seine sieben Sachen (something quite comparable to Flamingo Creatures), too. We will celebrate our start to the weekend at bei Roy, yeah.

Rae Spoon at Fab Lab: If you couldn't find the time on Monday, here's your second chance.

Saturday

Male Bonding and Moon Duo at Festsaal Kreuzberg: One of my most played songs on lastfm is by Male Bonding (Year's not long). A hit. Male Bonding are indie rock with a punk drum beat, a bit Dinosaur Jr if you know what I mean. Very good fun and a must for any fan of the genre. Moon Duo on the other hand do a darkish thing with drum machine, not unlike The Kills. In fact, this will really appeal fans of The Kills.

Review: Purling Hiss

I was super looking forward to this one, maybe a little too much. The songs I'd heard of Purling Hiss up to that point reminded me of a mix between Ty Segall and JEFF The Brotherhood. Hello beautiful! And I do love Monarch as a bar and as a venue or just as a living room.

We headed to Monarch fairly early and that was actually a good move. We didn't have to wait long before the band started. Just as a word of advice to you, you know. Monarch tends to start earlier than say West Germany or White Trash Fast Food. Be earlyish at Monarch. The room was nicely filled, albeit not packed. And the attendees of tonight's show were of surprisingly varied musical background: indie kids, elderly rockers, you name it. Interesting.

Purling Hiss, the Philadelphian trio surrounding mastermind Mike Polizze, are a rock outfit but have been known to add unconventional elements to their rock, hence my above comparison with groups like Ty Segall. If you listen to their singles online, you get just that: rock, with a relatively poppy beat and some breaks you weren't expecting.

Ha, none of that live. From the moment they entered the stage, they just rocked out hard. It was basically a classic rock show, including the guitar posing, long locks waving, ageing rockers at front of audience headbanging. And Purling Hiss were so very good at that, which turned into a conflict for me. I appreciated how good they were and how much they were putting into it, but unfortunately, I'm not a classic rock enough person. So those songs I knew, the more commercial ones I guess, that I had heard online, were just my thing and I really loved those. But the rest was like: wow, these guys are really good but they just don't really play my kind of music. 

Nevertheless, I had a brilliant time. That's partly because of Monarch as a venue, too. One entire wall consists of windows that face Kottbusser Tor and the stage is built in front of the wall that stands at an angle to those windows. Ok, that's kind of hard to explain without a floorplan. But the point is that passing people can look up from outside and see the band perform. And that's exactly what happened. Purling Hiss were rocking out and passer-bys, the police, homeless people were standing outside, looking up and smiling at the performance. So I was watching the band but I was also watching the non-paying audience outside and marvelled at how much fun they were getting out of this. It was just altoghether a relaxed and fun affair with rock music as the theme.

We didn't stay for the encord but joined the onlookers outside for a minute before we headed home, where we got early and content. A nice evening, yes.

If you want to find out more about Purling Hiss, there are really sweet pieces on them and some listening samples on Daytrotter and on Altered Zones.

Quick Review: Tephra

Admittedly, Tephra isn't exactly my cup of tea. Some of their songs really catch my attention but others don't at all. I like my noise, I like my rock but Tephra do a lot of that prolonged rocking à la Isis et al. I drift off. But Tephra are good people and old acquaintances of mine, so I followed their kind invitation and popped by Cassiopeia on a Friday night.

Tephra typically have a pretty solid fan base and I expected Cassiopeia to be packed. But it was lightly filled, technically enough to get an atmosphere going but not in the sense that anyone would have to sweat. I needn't worry about that anyway, not one single person danced, or moved at all for that matter. That was odd. I used to go to a lot of HC shows and I don't think I ever so an audience that still. 

Tephra rocked hard, their incredible drummer (he really is) giving everything. It was surreal how you had these four people onstage going wild and this static audience staring at them. Kinda funny. And especially so when the merch stall was extremely busy afterwards, with some folks buying one of every T-shirt designs. Mind you, they do know style, those guys in Tephra.

I think overall, and I may be a little out of line here, but I think overall Tephra is a "boys will be boys" kind of thing. I like noise, but I like it less in your face and more jazzy, if you know what I mean. But I did really enjoy myself and we all had a drink afterwards and went home happy.