Daily Sun feature/Grouper @ SPACE Gallery THIS SUNDAY!

Matt Dodge of the Portland Daily Sun wrote an excellent little spot on the solo show at Slainte last night:

"Jakob Battick is a tough act to define. Hillytown blogger Bryan Bruchman tried to pin it down prior to last week's Hillytown Presents show at Slainte, saying, “I've seen him do really experimental kinda stuff, to a straight-up loud rock set, expanding the songs and making them almost epic with huge sounds.”

With a rotating cast of characters wielding everything from guitars to accordions, Jakob Battick & Friends shows have ranged in intensity from the lone frontman delicately whispering into the mic to a full band, riffing away, stomping effects peddles and reaching crescendo after crescendo. “It's designed as an organic unit of myself and whoever I've been playing with,” said Battick.

At tonight's show, Jakob Battick will take the stage alone, using the performance as a means of exploring new sounds and notions, independent of his regular collective, who according to Battick have “burrowed deep under the mossy stones of Deering Oaks to sleep for the summer.”

Battick counts the avant-garde stylings of the Velvet Underground as an influence, but eschews the term. “For us, Velvet Underground is a huge influence, and they were all over the map,” he said.

The band has a hard time pinning down a genre for his music; any attempt at categorization is a running joke within the band. “We jokingly refer to it as nightmare folk,” said Battick. “It's folk rooted, you can call it dream or art-folk, but not really psychedelic, more of sort of a dramatic, spacious sort of thing.”

Battick describes the band's music as having evolved quite a bit from it's stripped down, noisy beginnings. “We're much more bold with everything, we upped the dreaminess and the broken, psychotic elements,” he said."


SPECIAL NON-JAKOB BATTICK & FRIENDS SHOW SPOTLIGHT
Sunday, June 6th @ SPACE Gallery
$8, 18+, doors at 8:00pm


(Photo by Bryan Spencer)

Liz Harris (Who plays under the moniker Grouper) is playing SPACE Gallery this Sunday night. Grouper is ethereal, spacious, pseudo-ambient songwriting, in the vein of artists like Flying Saucer Attack, The Cocteau Twins, Windy & Carl, or even Jeff Buckley's more dreamy efforts. Portland is EXTREMELY lucky to get this chance to see Grouper right downtown, in the heart of Congress St., for only eight dollars. At this point, I can't believe that I haven't heard more about this show, or heard more people getting excited for it.

Our good friend, Pete Swegart (Of Butcher Boy), recently tipped me off to the gauzy, aquatic magic that is Grouper, and I could not thank him enough for it now. Basically, Liz sets up (Or so I'm told/Or so I've read) with a bunch of effects units and her guitar, and proceeds to bury her audience in layer after layer of swirling, sleepy sounds. For a sampling of her music, I suggest listening to the crucial single "Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping" from her most recent (2008) full-length 'Dragging a Dead Deer Up A Hill':



(Forgive the video, for which I cannot vouch. It is some unofficial fan video, could be cool, could be a throwaway.)

As if all of this weren't enough, Planets Around The Sun will be playing their primal, ritualistic improv-jams between all of the sets of the evening. A group called Animal Hospital is also playing (I haven't heard them, but I have been told/read good things), and local Meleana Cadiz opens up. Sounds like a really phenomenal show, if you ask me.