LOG - 36


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6 June - Kagero, Artomatic festival, Washington, DC - based in Brooklyn, the "Japanese gypsy rock" group (minus their drummer) made a rare trip to DC. (The festival is being held in a vacant office building near the baseball stadium.)

19 June - Kureha, Stephanie Yanez, Vamp Star, and Nylon Pink @ Club Good Hurt, LA -- this is a club on the West side... you could call this a night of garage band rock, except the 3rd act, Vamp Star, is a bit different (more on that, later)...

Kureha does j-rock, or at least rock with Japanese lyrics... The members all seem to be Jpnz. expats, or something like that... The mix was murky. Hard to hear vocals. Interesting shifts in tempo and loudness. A little fancy guitar playing.


Although Stephanie Yanez spoke with slightly nasally tones and a high-pitched voice like a little girl, she sang forcefully and was surprisingly effective, at times, in cutting through the buzz of her band.


Vamp Star... describe themselves as "electric hentai pop punk, Perv-o-tronic, and techno sleaze rock" (That doesn't include goth nor industrial.)... Rob's stiff presence (he's rather immobile) on vocals is balanced by the writhings of kitty girls, Jade and J.

Nylon Pink

28 June - Crasdant (Wales), Welsh musical instruments, musicians from Veracruz, Mexico and Colombia, Las Cantadoras del Pacifico (Colombian Pacific coast), and Gwyneth Glyn (Wales), Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Nat'l. Mall, Washington, DC

Crasdant, a Welsh instrumental band


making Welsh harps

Welsh bagpipe

folk musicians from Veracruz, Mexico and Colombia
3rd picture: workshop presenter, on the left, is Daniel Sheehy. He's director of the Smithsonian Folklife Center and an ethnomusicologist who did his PhD fieldwork in Veracruz.

Cantadoras del Pacifico (from the Pacific coast of Colombia)

Gwyneth Glyn - singing in English and Welsh

30 June - reviewing musical news over the past week, I find that Sky Saxon, lead singer for the proto-punk 60s band, The Seeds (see 23 May entry), passed away last week.

8 July - in acknowledgement of the MJ memorial, yesterday, here's a momento I dug up. It's from an old bootleg cassette:

12 July - listened to part of the radio show, Studio360. They had a piece on ghazal, which included some remarks by Kiran Ahluwalia (whose gigs have been listed in the calendar). I've got an enhanced performance picture of her in the middle of the Log 24 page. Here's the ghazal segment:

18, 19 July - Secret Identities editors and contributors, Baltimore

18 July - ArtScape, Baltimore

Music Car - found this overly decorated car at the annual Baltimore arts festival

24 July - This morning, improv musicians, Susan Alcorn (pedal steel gtr.) and Audrey Chen (cello / voice) played (live?) on WYPR 88.1 FM, Baltimore. They were also interviewed. You can hear the soundfile of it here.

31 July - The radio show on WYPR that ran the piece on Alcorn and Chen, last week, mentioned some negative listener reactions to it. One woman called it the worst thing she'd ever heard on public radio. (I guess this would be an example of the maxim (paraphrased) that 'one person's art is another person's junk.')

17 August - Last week's Tavis Smiley radio show (distributed on public radio stations) aired an interview with the band, Hiroshima. They're celebrating their 30th anniversary. You can listen to it by going to this page.
Towards the end of the conversation, band co-founder Dan Kuramoto, mentions their experience at their first East Coast gig. You can see a few pictures from that event, here.

31 August - Gelatine, Typherus, and [geist] @ The Ottobar, Baltimore


Gelatine -- Japanese expats from NYC, with a cabaret rock approach...


Typherus -- from Boston (Berklee students) were strong individually, but could've used some more coordination


[geist] -- from Maryland

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