Time Out previews The Fortieth Day (11/1)

Featuring Bloodyminded players Isidro Reyes and Mark Solotroff (also of Anatomy of Habit), the Fortieth Day specializes in improvised noise that, as usual, sometimes disguises more going on than the overwhelming surface implies.

http://timeoutchicago.com/music-nightlife/music/15824346/the-fortieth-day-caltrop-black-skies-alma-negra-al-thawra

Time Out on Rabid Rabbit

A nice preview for the band's Sunday (4/29) show...

http://timeoutchicago.com/music-nightlife/music/15289991/rabid-rabbit-at-empty-bottle-concert-preview

Rabid Rabbit at Empty Bottle | Concert preview

Chicago doom purveyors drown their sorrows in low end.
By Areif Sless-Kitain

 

Rabid Rabbit

Photo: Mariah Karson

Don’t let the name fool you. Rabid Rabbit moves at an ominous, glacial pace. The Garfield Park group has grown into a unique and potent purveyor of doom, with an outlook that extends from a placid grimace to an imposing scowl. After several iterations, the lineup has solidified into a quartet unified in vision and intent, featuring not twin guitars but two basses. The subsuming low end is hardly the only way in which the band deviates from its peers.

That much is startlingly evident on the band’s impressive second album, last year’s Czarny Sen, which translates to black dream in Polish, a nod to vocalist-bassist Andrea Jablonski’s homeland. Her haunting monotone approaches a drone, set against guitarist Dan Sullivan’s grim power chords and pro shredding. Her voice lends tonal variation to an otherwise proudly bleak palette. Second bassist Arman Mabry and drummer Mike Tsoulos thicken the concoction to a cosmic funeral dirge.

The group’s talent for the unlikely includes improvisation, as saxophonist Dave Rempis demonstrates via scalding skronk both on the record and often live. He’s not on hand at the Bottle tonight, but Rabid Rabbit’s devastating art-sludge never fails to leave a glorious stain on the local scene.

Time Out on AoH 4/21

We need to get Time Out a new blurb... "Anatomy of Habit's punishing doom-gaze gives voice to the dark thoughts of Bloodyminded mouthpiece Mark Solotroff. Setting the stage is Sean Patrick Riley of Bloodiest (see Top live shows)."  http://timeoutchicago.com/music-nightlife/music/15255366/anatomy-of-habit-man

Time Out mentioned The Fortieth Day

From: Time Out Chicago


Featuring Bloodyminded players Isidro Reyes and Mark Solotroff (also of Anatomy of Habit), the Fortieth Day specializes in improvised noise that, as usual, sometimes disguises more going on than the overwhelming surface implies. A/V sonic architect Lori Felker opens, along with a DJ set from Felker's label benefactor Southbridge.


(The Empty Bottle, Sunday November 13, 2011)

More from Time Out on 3/15

From Time Out

Music

Esben and the Witch at Empty Bottle; Salem at Empty Bottle | Concert previews

Salem and Esben and the Witch fly on broomsticks into the Empty Bottle this week. But which is truly bewitching?

By Brent DiCrescenzo



One of the more inane microgenres born on blogs, witchhouse is merely a new spin on goth. Chillwave’s evil doppelgänger buries spooky keyboards in shallow-fidelity graves as obscured vocals sing of bones instead of beaches. Honestly, it’s like Bauhaus, had Bauhaus grown up on hip-hop and been given no budget.

Salem has become the most publicized face of the sound, primarily because the Michigan trio serves up great journalist juice. Member John Holland was quoted in BUTT magazine talking about his days as a teen prostitute, and the band has titled an EP Yes, I Smoke Crack, modeled for fashion spreads in The New York Times Magazine and generally bombed hard onstage.

Less discussed was the group’s debut album, 2010’s King Night, a murk of cheap gangsta riddims, menacing keyboards and mumbled threats. Like a wet dream of Larry Clark, Jack Donoghue raps monosyllabic, nihilistic thoughts on “Sick.” But strip away the layers of gimmicks and you’re left with little more than a smoke machine.

To be fair, the far more literate Esben & The Witch merely have the misfortune of putting “witch” in their name during this witchhouse trend. The Brighton, England, threesome goes trad gothic on its recent first record, Violet Cries, something that could have easily fit alongside Dead Can Dance on 4AD circa 1986.

Rachel Davies takes her bittersweet time, chanting low in drawn-out vowels over a fog of delicate feedback and faint tribal drumming. What at first seems like a palette of pure gray reveals surprising detail on closer listens, as when the keyboards tink like dripping icicles in “Hexagons IV.” There’s a seamless mix of digital and organic textures, but more important, some real emotion. Esben can be harrowing, gorgeous or somehow both, but it’s not all shock tactics and makeup.

Time Out previews 3/12 show

From Time Out Chicago

Art-metaller Sun Splitter combines that genre's usual chug and riff action with intriguing electronic tomfoolery enlisted to blur the edges of the music and shape it into something new and extra-menacing. The headline slot goes to Anatomy of Habit, punishing Pancho's with devastating doom-gaze.

Time Out previews 2/25 show

From Time Out Chicago:

Bottomless Pit was formed by Silkworm's Andy Cohen and Tim Midgett following the tragic death of the band's drummer Michael Dahlquist. Bassist Brian Orchard and Seam drummer Chris Manfrin were recruited into the fold and life moved on, though the legacy of Silkworm still hangs heavy over the project. Anatomy of Habit follows with punishing doom-gaze, giving voice to the dark thoughts of Bloodyminded's Mark Solotroff.

(yep, the copy and paste routine...)

Time Out on 2/19

From Time Out Chicago

“Noise annoys,” winked the Buzzcocks, but they likely had no idea the level of cacophony that would soon grow out of the collision of punk and the avant-garde underground. Not that the reunited Frontier is strictly a noise act, mind you. Rather, the bricolage-minded group embraces sound in all its shapes, forms and volumes. Detroit’s Wolf Eyes is more visceral and less forgiving, while David Reed’s industrial synth work as Envenomist hearkens back to that sub-genre’s minimalist birth. Bloodyminded brings the maelstrom and Plague Bringer the relentless grindcore.

Time Out on 10/31

From Time Out Chicago:

Chicago's doom-a-rific Indian soundtracks the apocalypse. France's Monarch! cites “mainly Black Sabbath” as an influence, but things are even more sludgy, spooky and slowed down than the comparison might portend. The shape-shifting haunted house drone-psych outfit Rabid Rabbit opens.

Time Out on 9/11

From Time Out Chicago

Anatomy of Habit and E.T. Habit fulfill your quirk quota, the former with punishing doom-gaze and the latter with mindfuck psych jams—two habits they hope you won't wanna quit.

Time Out on Frontier

From Time Out Chicago

The final Frontier
Empty Bottle’s old house band reunites for more noise and
wedding bells.

By Jake Austen

BLOCK PARTY Left to right, Tsoulos, Ireland and Wessley reunite this weekend for an old friend’s wedding.

Spreading out a bounty of CDs, CD-Rs and screenprinted posters on my kitchen table, Michael Tsoulos is overjoyed to be talking again about Frontier, the band for which he drummed for 14 years. Inactive since 2003, the trio (joined for a time by Nate Bayless) of Tsoulos, guitarist Stephen Wessley and bassist Kevin Ireland reunites this week in a role none of them would have predicted: wedding band. On Saturday 4, a marathon, three-set stand at the Empty Bottle will be performed in conjunction with the wedding of longtime friend Mark Ferguson, owner of Hard Boiled Records & Videos in Roscoe Village.

The threesome, now all 42, began exploring music together as undergrads at the University of Chicago in 1986. Ferguson turned his classmates on to challenging European industrial acts like Laibach, Nurse with Wound and Wiseblood; by 1991, the friends’ music fandom had gelled into a band. Soon, Frontier found a home base at the newly opened Empty Bottle, where Tsoulos tended bar until 2006.

Though forward-thinking jazz and garage-rock bookings put the Bottle on the Chicago rock map, Frontier, which was as close to a house band as the club had, didn’t fit either genre. It borrowed jazz’s improvisation and punk’s sense of showmanship, but Frontier’s greatest asset was a resistance to easy categorization. Hour-long sets of droning noise and feedback, hypnotic electronic manipulations, punishing heavy rock and an occasional pretty pop song were all in its arsenal. The group hosted guitar feedback jams that prohibited participants from touching their strings.

Frontier released 8-track tapes, an album on Emperor Jones, and two CDs on the Empty Bottle’s forgotten and short-lived imprint, Tug O’ War. “Frontier had the potential for genius,” recalls Bruce Finkelman, owner of the Empty Bottle, “but also the possibility of the biggest train wreck. I loved that you never knew where it was going to go.” Buying a Frontier ticket or album was an act of faith, with no guarantee how, or even if, the band members would play their instruments. “They did one recording session in my apartment,” Ferguson says, “where they just leaned the guitars near my windows, so as buses drove by on Division it would set off the reverb.”

Studio exploration aside, Frontier’s true forte was live performance, which overwhelmed small clubs with stadium-scaled lighting, fog machines and projections of slides and light patterns. For the pulverizing rock song “Truck,” the band used two 3,000-watt photo floodlights, air horns and smoke machines to simulate the experience of a semitrailer crashing into the audience head-on.

Tsoulos, who now plays in the skronky art-metal outfit Rabid Rabbit with his wife and fellow bartender Andrea Jablonski, tells me Frontier will again perform “Truck,” with full effects, during a “rock” set on Saturday, between “ambient” and “electronic” sets. Beaming with pride, he converts my table into an overflowing cornucopia of recordings, including two new limited-edition 12" records of unreleased material pressed for the show. “The other thing that made them special was how enthused they always were about their music,” Finkelman says. Yet there are no plans beyond this weekend; Ireland owns a hotel in Kansas while Wessley resides in Manhattan.

Frontier was always its own best audience, perhaps best demonstrated by the Foam Series in 2000–01, the band’s last hurrah at the Bottle: two-hour sets of experimental live-band techno late into Sunday night. “I remember stepping off the stage in mid-set during an ambient portion,” Tsoulos says. “I bought shots for everyone in the bar. All five of them.”

Yet the man most excited about this reunion may be Ferguson, who sees his wedding band as a harbinger of good things to come. “Frontier goes from blissful drone to space rock to electronica,” Ferguson says. “I’m hopeful that my marriage turns out to have that kind of range.”

Frontier reunites at the Empty Bottle Saturday 4.