Pilcrow

Atom™, playing the Decibel Opening Party showcase at Re-Bar

My Flickr Pro account expired early in October, right when I was flat broke and couldn't afford to renew it. A free Flickr membership has restrictions on uploading photos, and will only display the 200 most recently uploaded photos, so I didn't bother trying to upload my Decibel Festival photos until I renewed my Pro membership. Well, with all the financial juggling I've been doing to try to catch up on my various late accounts and also cover my regular expenses, I didn't bother renewing my Pro membership until yesterday. So yesterday evening I finally went through my Decibel Festival photos and uploaded the ones I felt were worthwhile.


Ladytron, playing the Sinthetic showcase at the Showbox at the Market

I started out with 150 photos, which is a small amount relatively speaking. But I hadn't bothered to try taking lots of photos this year, for a couple reasons. For one, this year KEXP had a small and moderately well-coordinated group of bloggers and photographers attending the shows, so I expected that between KEXP's own photographers and the official Decibel Festival photo pool, I would have enough good photos to use for the blog posts. For another, although I once again borrowed Gina's fairly decent digital camera, I wasn't actually getting very good results in a lot of venues. Generally the venues were so dark that even putting the camera on the nighttime setting wasn't enough to make up the difference, and I was reluctant to use the flash as I wasn't expecting good results with it and also felt that it was inappropriate for me to do so as an unofficial photographer (and I had a vague idea that at least some venues were restricting the pro photographers from using flash). As a result, after I'd sorted through my photos and discarded the ones that I felt weren't worthwhile, I ended up with a set of just 36 photos, which you can see in my Decibel Festival 2011 set on Flickr. 


Amon Tobin (hidden inside the largest cube in that structure), playing the Red Bull Music Academy Presents showcase at the Paramount Theatre

Fortunately I was able to get some decent photos of Amon Tobin's amazing stage set for his ISAM Live production, as you can see in the previous photo. Unfortunately, static photos can't begin to do justice to just how cool and amazing it was to see the video projected onto the building-block structure that produced a realistic three-dimensional effect without glasses. As far as I'm concerned, this is as close as we can come with traditional two-dimensional video to the ideal of true three-dimensional holographic projection. 





You can still read my KEXP Blog post about the Amon Tobin showcase, as well as my post on the Opening Party. Unfortunately, with all the things I had going on in October, I was never able to make time to get any more posts written about Decibel Festival for the KEXP Blog. However, I will still try to make time soon to do a brief write-up of the rest of Decibel Festival here on my blog. 


Kid Hops, playing the Onset showcase at the Baltic Room

Here's an assortment of photos from the bands I managed to see outside either the Bumbershoot Music Lounge or Bumbershoot After Dark on Saturday and Sunday. I'll save the Monday photos for tomorrow's post.

Saturday

Craft Spells:



Little Dragon:



Sunday

Warpaint:



Tycho:



School of Seven Bells:



Lusine:



See the full Bumbershoot 2011: Saturday photoset on Flickr.

See the full Bumbershoot 2011: Sunday photoset on Flickr.

Urge Overkill:



Charles Bradley:



Fitz & the Tantrums:



Phantogram:



Grant Lee Buffalo:



The Bumbershoot Music Lounge clears out after the final act of the weekend, Grant Lee Buffalo:



DJ Kevin Cole, signing off from the Bumbershoot Music Lounge:



See the full Bumbershoot 2011: Monday photoset on Flickr.

The Bumbershoot Music Lounge, before the start of the first act, Shabazz Palaces:



Shabazz Palaces:



Vetiver:



Vusi Mahlasela:



Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue:



Starfucker (STRFKR):



DJ Shannon (on the right, in black) and her crew:



See the full Bumbershoot 2011: Saturday photoset on Flickr.

I was so caught up in my KEXP duties this afternoon at Bumbershoot, I totally forgot about making a quick photo post while I was there. So instead, I'll post one of the several fantastic shots I was able to get of School of Seven Bells, performing in the EMP SkyChurch:



I had no idea when I was taking the photos that they were coming out so well. I'll share more later once I get them all up on Flickr.

Hey, look! It's a pretty good quality photo considering it was taken after 8:30 pm, in the deepening twilight! Amazing what a proper camera with a "night photo" setting can do! Okay, so the band's too dark, but that's just because there aren't any stage lights, it's not the camera's fault.


That's Black Mountain onstage at the Mural Amphitheatre, performing for the Concert at the Mural sponsored by KEXP and Seattle Center. Photo by me, taken using a Canon PowerStat SD1000 Digital Elph camera that I borrowed from Gina for this week and next week's concert shoots.


Glad that I figured out how to get the night shot setting this week, as next week's show will only get darker earlier.

Hey Marseilles


The Maldives

(Note to self: using the LiveJournal Scrapbook web interface is worse than posting from the LiveJournal app, and doesn't allow for thumbnails bigger than "medium" (320x240) while the app defaults to "large" (640x480); better to use the LJ app or just wait until photos are uploaded to Flickr and link from there.)

This weekend I'll be covering the Capitol Hill Block Party for KEXP, so I'm making sure to finish up my other reviews before then. As it happens I've only been to one concert this month (July for some reason is often a slow concert month for me), and I actually didn't take many notes about it. 

When I was at the Rendezvous JewelBox Theater for the C'est La Mort / Blue Light Curtain show, I was given a tip that I should attend the following week to see a band being billed as "Megatouch". So the following Saturday, July 2, I was back at the Rendezvous for the mysterious Megatouch, revealed only a few hours beforehand to actually be Sleepy Eyes of Death. Sleepy Eyes of Death announced recently that they would be playing one final show at Neumos on August 26 and then disbanding, so this was a surprise opportunity to catch them up close and personal before they go. Opening for them were Trophy Hunter and Haunted Horses.

Trophy Hunter was a duo, a punk-style shouty-sung vocalist and a guitarist, with a drum machine for beats. They had a touch of the post-punk artiness to them—a bit of Gang of Four, perhaps—and were not bad at all. 

Haunted Horses were another duo, this time on guitar and drums with both singing vocals, augmenting their music with some synth and sample-looping. They were further along the dark post-punk vein, with cool synchopated rhythms and jarred angular melodies, and some pretty fierce drumming. They made me think that where punk is about the short sharp shock, post-punk takes the energy and anger of punk and applies it to the complexities of art rock. I liked Haunted Horses quite a bit and will keep an eye out for them.

I was familiar with Sleepy Eyes of Death by name, and knew I'd heard and liked some of their music on KEXP, but couldn't really remember what they were like. So it was a bit of a pleasant surprise to discover they were basically keyboard-led hard-driving prog rock, very much in the style of the late '70s and early '80s (complete with space-y sounding keyboards). They had some vocals sung through a vocoder, but basically played instrumentals. They had a really epic sound, at times heavy enough even for metal but always bringing it back to sweeping soundscapes. I went from being vaguely familiar with them to a big fan, and was sorry to know that this may be my only chance to see them but pleased that at least I did get that opportunity. (Again, their last show will be Friday August 26 at Neumos; tickets are only $10 and apparently still available, so I'd better pick one up myself soon…)

I complained in my last post about the generally poor lighting at the Rendezvous, making it very difficult for me to get any decent photos at shows there. And indeed, my photos of Haunted Horses are barely acceptable and only because I was right by the stage; I managed to get a few somewhat better photos of Trophy Hunter for the same reason. But the big surprise turned out to be Sleepy Eyes of Death—despite or perhaps even because of their heavy use of a smoke machine, I took several photos that turned out quite well, I thought. You can check out the whole set on Flickr, as usual, but I think I'll include one here too.