Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Last Night's Western Mass Noise/Improv Festival




Last night in western mass there was a noisy improv festival. Two favorites of this scene, both from the well-known and beloved band Fat Worm Of Error, each hosted events at popular music stores in the area. Neel Young had his show at Amherst's Mystery Train Records and Tim Sheldon had his shindig over in Northampton at Feeding Tube.

Happily, Neel played his old man card and scheduled the Amherst show to begin on the early side, around 6-ish and it did so. I arrived just a bit after that time and the first band was already jollily grooving right along. The Feeding Tube show was going to start around 10, thanks to their neighbors at Subway so if a person had a ride and an inclination, one could attend both shows from start to finish. I did do this to the best of my ability, thanks to DbR who was game for the scene as well and my designated driver.

As I started to mention before, we arrived at MT to find everyone blissed out by the band FROZEN CORN, which consists of three men playing banjo and guitar. Josh Burkett switched between banjo and guitar while Chris Carlton played only guitar and occasionally sang lead and Tony Pasquarosa played only banjo and took his turn on the lead vocals. They did sweet old timey music, original and traditional covers. They were the only acoustic set of the night.



Then there were the three other sets of this show at Mystery Train. See chart.





Feeding Tube was a-flurry when we got there, with three blond women getting ready to each do a set as well as Tim Sheldon with his set up of electronica on the couch in the front room. It was not as festive as it steadily became, however, as the time progressed toward the magic 10 pm and the folks started to pour in from Amherst. Tim, performing as Rack Rash, started it all off with a set of low sounds.



I was completely distracted from his music unfortunately, as he had asked me before he started to play to busy myself with his physical props and visual ads during the short set to augment his music. This hullabaloo, although lovely, was not needed as he was begged by the audience to play more after his set quickly finished. He told us that if he were to play more, it would be like "putting a cannonball back into the gun."



We scratched our heads in wonderment at that statement and looked forward to the women's sets.



The last set was by a new band named Tape Jazz. These folks were a super cute couple who I have seen around and I'm very excited to hear their music another night before 8 other acts and hopefully before 12:30 AM. I remained for only a few songs unfortunately.


Albert and Laura as Tape Jazz.


A great night, thanks everyone.
BTW-all of this is for fun, there was no competition nor wagering.



The author and Jenny Graf arguing about Red Rocks.

2 comments:

No Stand In Will Do said...

Thanks to David Russell for all the photos except the first three. The photos on the poster are a toss up and probably a mix of his photos and my photos. Probably mostly his. But from the photo of Raub Roy to the end of the blog, they are all DbR's.

photo wizard said...

I'd like to say first of all that I wasn't improvising. Second, the author failed to mention that I ripped it, even if it was just a piece of paper.