Monday, April 5, 2021

Monday Roundup #12

In the absence of concert listings, my regular Monday dispatches have fallen off. After bringing some life to the blog with the "bumping into" series, I figure I should get back in the groove. I'm guessing that this will be a bit like what used to get shoved into the end of the post when I was doing listings — some bandcamp suggestions, nods to a few livestreams, and sundry community notes (email me if you have anything that needs broadcast in the latter category!). Plus maybe a look back through the MFS archives.


Livestream nation:

  • The postponed Women From Space Festival arrives in our orbit this weekend (April 9th to 11th), so take some time to discover some adventurous sounds, either flat on your screen or in your hologram viewer.

Requiem for a CD store:

  • Sadness over the weekend with the arrival of news of Soundscapes' imminent closing. The store was hugely important to me, a nexus of musical community that helped connect a lot of dots in the time when I was just starting to diligently pay attention to interesting local sounds. The sort of store you'd duck into if you were walking by, even if just to say hello to whoever was working behind the counter. There are already some more expressive remembrances appearing than I could muster, so I'm just going to cast my mind back to some of the many in-store performances I remember seeing there and hope that the future-times will still have some sort of discovery spaces like this.

Video Hits:

  • Dany Laj took to the feeds this weekend with a "virtual tour", revisiting old friends and giving a sobering reminder of the costs of a loss of a year's career opportunities for touring musicians. Here's a perfectly-charming video previewing Dany Laj & The Looks' forthcoming album — hopefully these rock'n'roll road warriors will be able to get back in front of some live audiences after it arrives.

Bandcamp corner:

  • I sure miss getting to witness seeing Colin Fisher play. The liquid dexterousness that he deploys on this album certainly doesn't surprise, but the careful settings provided by producer Jeremy Greenspan give the sounds an impressively-considered situatedness.
  • Speaking of home-bound road-warriors, Beams won't be able to take this to their hard-won, far-flung friends just yet, but that does give some extra time to soak in the fine sonic details of this album, pushing the band further along their trajectory from intimate folksters to gliding Chicago-style post-rockers.

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