Ladies of K Pt. 1 compilation!
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K News! Meet The Ladies of K, Pt. 1 – April 18th, 2012
K NewsMeet the Ladies of K, Pt. 1!
Mirah’s A Golden Girl
Mirah talks with Sara Marcus, author of Girls To The Front about her Olympia roots, riot grrrl and her adventurous life as a child activist. Such a treat for us (and for you)! She’s in France right now for the ‘Portland is Weird’ event after a month of sugaring, and is currently a resident of Brooklyn, NY.
Read the whole interview (its a lengthy one, so grab a snack) on our blog HERE!
Kelly Norman: Drums and Heartbeats
An Interview with Kelly Norman (of The Maxines) – at Helsing Junction Sleepover 2011
Kelly’s set up: 1962 Gretsch Champagne Sparkle with matching snare
When you play live venues, what sound requests do you make?
It drives my sound engineer friends crazy, but I hate to have my drums mic’d, especially my tom & snare. [Since] I sing and play at the same time, there is tons of drum bleed into the vocal mic. If the drums are mic’d it’s just a further amplification and it gets tricky. The overall effect is that my drums seem super loud and it’s sometimes challenging while playing and singing. But I totally get it. Sometimes you have to mic drums. I tend to prefer the little Olympia house shows, so anytime we play a for-real venue with a sound person I get a little squirmy about things. I should probably get over it.
-Excerpted from Tom Tom Magazine (rad female drumming magazine based out of Portland, OR!) http://tomtommag.com/2011/12/fest-nw/
Kendl Winter: A Little Bit Country
The fact that Kendl Winter already fronts a wildly successful band ‘The Blackberry Bushes’ doesn’t stop her most recent album The Mechanics of Hovering Flight from being a slow-dream of a record, full of twang, dark soul and beautiful collaborations. “Long Way” is one of our favorites from the album, her sophomore release on K, but honestly, its hard to choose.
Shana Cleveland: The Artist
Shana Cleveland, lead singer of ‘The Curious Mystery‘ is an incredible painter and visual artist who favors portraits of rock and soul groups from the 50′s & 60′s. She lives and works in Seattle, but is currently acting as artist in residence at the Ace Hotel in NYC with the rest of the CMers. ”Be Still” is the yet-to-be released single off of The Curious Mystery’s upcoming 7″. Check out the Curious Mystery website for pictures, additional artwork and show dates: http://thecuriousmystery.com/.
Katie Alice Greer: Chain & The Gang
Oh, what to say about Katie Alice Greer. She is a monstrous force. Hilarious. Satirical. A knock out. An amazing screamer, kicker, do-gooder. A Chain & the Ganger that digs the primary colors and red lipstick, she is out there creating her own brand of rock’n'roll each and every day–like right now. C&TG (Ian Svenonius, Fiona Campbell, Madison Farmer, Brett Lyman and Katie) are playing shows across the states to support their new album In Cool Blood (KLP240), set to come out on K in July. Go see them play and be in awe of K.A.G. in person. “Free Will” is a debut from the new record! Enjoy!
Emily Beanblossom is Ruby Fray
Seeing Emily Beanblossom perform live is an amazing experience. As the lead singer of Christmas she thrashes around on the floor and through the crowd, flinging her crazy beautiful voice around the room, but in Ruby Fray her presence is focused, balanced. The words “witchy” and “ethereal” have been used to describe her new album “Pith” which showcases both sweet-pop tracks and dark weird psych-folk songs. There is nothing like Pith anywhere in the world right now, which makes sense, since there is no woman in the world as artfully mysterious as Emily Beanblossom. She lives in Austin, TX.
TJO
Tara Jane ONeil–you know who she is, yes? “Sirena” is a track off of her new 7″ of the same name. An LA resident (in theory) TJO is a crazy world traveler and visual artist who loves to collaborate and push herself and her guitar in myriad directions at once.
Which leads us to…
Melanie Valera/TENDER FOREVER & “Keep Portland Weird”
We can’t be in Paris for ‘Keep Portland Weird’ festival, but TJO, Mirah & Tender Forever are all there to be a part of it. They’ve been sending images back of subway terminals plastered with giant posters of the event, and K’s proud to represent.
Along with helping to curate this event, Melanie Valera of Tender Forever lives in Olympia, WA, just released a darker LP this last November, Where Are We From, and is going back into the studio this Spring to record some more…
We hope you love the Ladies of K Compilation!
Until Next TIme…
Mirah Interview
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Sara Marcus, the author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, sat down with K’s own beloved Mirah on February 23rd in Brooklyn, NY. They discussed Mirah’s experiences as a young, eager artist in Olympia, the adventurous activism of her youth, and the cultivation of a sound and identity uniquely her own.
Mirah: I feel extremely fortunate about certain things in my life: I had a really supportive and loving family, I had opportunities to adventure and experience the world in some pretty unique ways even when I was still a kid. I traveled before going to college—I didn’t go straight to college, and I was only 17 when I moved to Olympia. So I moved away from my family, which had all these strong matriarchs as well as my music-loving and completely supportive dad, but I happened to move to Olympia, where the scene was dominated by women, was super feminist and really supportive. It was feminist and supportive and female dominated, and at the same time not made up of just women. There were men involved with the scene and involved with making music and putting the music out. And so in a lot of ways I feel sometimes like one of the privileges I have held—that I hold—is that I didn’t ever have to deal with living in an oppressive, sexist community, either within my own family or at 17 moving away to go to college.
I remember a high school friend visiting me in Olympia during my second year and I was introducing everyone and bringing her around and she stayed over at my house. After she had been visiting me for a couple of days I remember her asking me something like, “Where are the men?” And I said, “I don’t know, I guess there aren’t that many around.” I hadn’t even noticed! Of course I wouldn’t notice. This is the same friend who … I must’ve told you this story before, right? When I was in high school I saw this band at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, two African-American women whose band name was just their last names- Cassleberry-Duprée. I thought they were great, and when a couple of months later I read they were coming to play in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania museum, and I was like, “Hope! Liz! Let’s go to this concert, I saw them at the Folk Festival and they’re really great!” I think we were, maybe 16 already, maybe we were still 15. We were young, but we must’ve gotten there somehow, so maybe Hope already had her license. So we go to this concert and there we were, in this huge beautiful auditorium, surrounded by people, and after the show Hope and Liz were like, “There were NO MEN there… And I think the whole audience was lesbians!” And I was like “Oh! I didn’t even notice…” I didn’t notice! I didn’t notice that there were no men there and that it was all lesbians. We still all crack up about that story!
Sara: And at that point, you’re thinking about your own identity miles away?
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M: Well, now when I look back at something like that, I might guess that I didn’t notice because I didn’t set myself very much apart from that community. I didn’t notice that the audience was almost exclusively female and queer. I did notice that we were in the minority of white people there. And I noticed that I felt comfortable and not out of place. I think that illustrates something about both the folly and wisdom of youth, the way that you know yourself on an intrinsic level better than anyone else ever will, but can seem spaced out and like you’re not “getting it,” whatever “it” is. I think it’s funny to remember that story and then compare it to how I felt when I was 18 and felt too shy and dorky to go into the Bikini Kill show backstage at the Capitol Theater in Olympia. I was with a friend and we peeked in but then decided we didn’t want to go. I looked in there at all the cool (and white!) riot grrrls and felt out of place, not cool enough. But now here I am years later seeing all kinds of connections between myself and the reasons why I began making music, which include aspects of both of these stories. In spite of my perception of myself at the time of not being cool enough for riot grrrl, I owe a lot to that movement for paving certain roads, just as riot grrrl owes a lot to several generations-worth of revolutionary women, feminists, out-lesbians, activists and artists.
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But actually, I wanted to say this other thing about the influence of Olympia, which was that I—there was a very special thing that was happening Olympia—which was that there were a lot of women my age, you know, Evergreen people or—it wasn’t just Olympia, it was throughout the northwest, but I was living in Olympia so that was where I saw it—there was really strong community, and this is the community that grew into riot grrrl, A lot of people who were sort of like “Fuck it! I’m gonna make my own music!” became riot grrrl. And there were a lot of other people who were there when that was fermenting who didn’t necessarily join the club. I was one of those people. I didn’t feel cool enough. I didn’t look quite like a riot grrrl. I’m not really that good at looking like whatever the club dictates—I’ve never been really good at that. But just the fact that that was happening in my environment was extremely influential and inspiring and really, I think it helped me to overcome some of my own tendencies towards perfectionism and also a tendency—like a lot of people have—towards falling prey to my own self-judgments and self-doubts. The whole riot grrrl movement is like, “You know what? Fuck them, and fuck what they think. We’re gonna do this thing.” There are parts of that that I can get into, but I have a different way of expressing myself, different energy and different language. I’m very me–very idiosyncratic–about everything I do and its okay that my ways are just too weird or grumpy and not general enough to be the basis for a whole cultural movement. I’ve learned a lot and have benefited from the riot grrrl movement and I think we’re all on the same path ultimately, and we’re all getting to where we’re going.
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Mirah went on to discuss her childhood, atypical and nomadic as it was. From a very young age she was traveling, and representing the ideas that she found personally powerful and compelling.
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M: When I was in elementary school—this is the ’80s, right, so in 1984 I was in 4th grade, and there was a lot of talk about the nuclear arms race, the nuclear apocalypse. It was really scary stuff and I didn’t quite understand it. I knew there was this thing called the Cold War, and I knew there were these things called nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire planet and I didn’t trust that that wouldn’t happen for really, really insignificant reasons. My little girl brain was like, “Why are we mad at each other? I don’t get it.” So starting in 4th grade I had this awareness of the world as a big and complicated and kind of scary place with a lot of unknowns. When I was in 6th grade—the summer after 6th grade I went to my family reunion and I talked to my cousin Crystal and she told me, “I’m doing this really amazing thing I think you should know about it, it’s called The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, and we’re walking across the country and trying to end the nuclear arms race”. My cousin was 10 at the time. Her mom, my Aunt Susan, had been an activist for decades, she’d been involved with organizing the Mother’s Day actions at the Nevada test sight and with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. My cousin decided that she was just going to do this thing even though her mom and dad couldn’t go. They found a temporary guardian for her and there she went, walking across the country for five months.
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After she’d be doing it for a couple months she came back to the family reunion and talked to me about it and I was like, “I totally want to do that. Find me a guardian!” And so my parents signed me over to a woman (who they’d never met!) named Sarah Broadwell—she was a friend of Crystal’s guardian, Bianca. I guess I was a pretty independent kid. Crystal too. Sometimes I meet 10 and 12 year old kids now and I can’t imagine them being able to just go out into the world in the ways that Crystal and I did. Sometimes I wonder if our parents were out of their minds for letting us do what we did when we were so young, but I’m glad they did. I think it shaped both of us in really positive ways. We were capable and safe, we were socially engaged and totally empowered by the experience and by the independence and responsibility for ourselves which we were entrusted with. And so, at 12 I took six weeks off 7th grade—it was the fall of my 7th grade year—and I went on this peace march. My parents dropped me off in Harrisburg and we marched across Pennsylvania, to New York City and all the way DC. It was a really incredible experience; I could probably talk for hours about it. It was important for me because of what it represented–it was one of my first experiences with political activism, and the whole model was about the importance of grass-roots communication and how small steps and small actions can make a huge impact.
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S: Would you hold events in the cities, and stop in the cities and have like town hall meetings?
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M: There were all sorts of things. There were musical performances, there were talks that were given and community meetings where people could come and find out what was going on. Marchers would go to schools and churches and synagogues. And the reason why those peace walks happened—and a lot of them happened in the ‘80s—and the reason they happened the way they did is because it’s a radical political action to just go somewhere and sit down to dinner with someone who may or may not share the same political or social views with you and have a conversation. Some people would want to join because they saw the march as an embodiment of a conviction that they already held, and some hadn’t thought much about it before and they’d be curious to talk it out. Just having conversations with people can be a totally radical act, and a very effective and gratifying way to create change. An internet petition is all well and good, but this was hundreds of people walking across the country and staying in a different town every night and essentially sitting down to dinner with people from the town every night.
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There was thing called Marcher in the Home where people in the town who were interested would come to our tent city and say, “I’ve got space for three!” and three marchers would go to their house. Sometimes I wish that, as a child, I kept track of every single place that I’d slept in my life, like every single bed in every state, every country. I’d love to see that list and I think it would be enormous. But anyway, the Great Peace March. It was a nine month event, LA to DC, in 1986. And—I’m so long-winded, holy crap! I did some other peace marches too. There was a Life magazine photographer named Jeff Share, and he was assigned to do a photo essay about three different marchers who were going to be on the Soviet walk, which I did the summer after 7th grade, which was in Russia, from (then) Leningrad to Moscow. And so my entire 7th grade class had to sign a release form—
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S: Your whole class went on the march?
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M: No.
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S: Oh, they were going to follow you.
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M: Jeff was super sweet and he took some amazing photos; I still have a whole stack of the prints. He was going to follow me, this native American guy named Robert Mirabel, and Franklin Folsom–I think was his name–who was a septuagenarian Iowan. Maybe there was a fourth person, I can’t remember. We were the three marchers that Life magazine chose to have the photographer follow, so he visited each of the subjects before the march. He followed me around at middle school with his fancy Life Magazine camera. I think I took it more in stride then than I take photo shoots now.
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S: And so that meant photo releases from all of your classmates.
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M: Right, and so starting in 7th grade I was very out as someone who was very different from most of the people around me.
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Ruby Fray’s Pith Out TODAY!
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The long-awaited solo release from Emily Beanblossom (aka Ruby Fray) is finally here, and we’re totally stoked! Pith [KLP239] is a haunting debut, brimming with Emily’s wicked vocals and bittersweet harmonies. You can order your copy over at the K Mail Order Dept. And while in the midst of being immersed in the strange universe of Pith, don’t forget to keep an eye out for Ruby Fray tour dates this summer!
You can read the beautiful review of Pith on Secretly Important, here!
K News: Hive from the Wilderness!
K News
The Tara Jane Connection!
Tara Jane O’Neil is a major player in the K world and what the wtf she has a new volume in our International Pop Underground series hitting the streets next month, “Sirena” / “Rainbow Connection” [IPU136]!
Discriminating patrons or the arts are getting in on a special offer from the K Mail Order Dept. – one may pre-order “Sirena” to be sent April 20 as either a digital downloadable MP3 or 45 rpm phonograph record. Said pre-orders will not only succeed in achieving the listenability of “Sirena” more than one month before the general populace, it also results in a bonus song by Tara Jane O’Neil, “Bee Leave“, sent immediately (as an MP3 digital downloadable) to you, our fearless K reader. Sweet dealings in the digital domain!
The Hive Dwellers Twirl and Hewn!
Gabriel Will of the Hive Dwellers at AikEi Pro’s Record Shop, Holly Springs, Ms.
The new album by The Hive Dwellers, Hewn from the Wilderness [KLP241], is the essence of rock’n'roll moved from the garage to the basement to the rec room and then back out into the wild. Calvin Johnson plays guitar and sings his songs in combination with Gabriel Will on assorted stringed instruments and the contributions of several distinctive drummers who have made their mark on the Hive Dwellers: Spencer Kelley, Brett Lyman and K.E. Sixx. (currently Evan Hashi is occupying the treasured Hive Dwellers throne). It’s a new Loretta Lynn underground show touring the country right now, one of the best combinations in the last ten years, a perfect traveling troupe of twirl twang breaks and southern Thurston County charm from a North Thurston trio.
What does it all mean? The album Hewn from the Wilderness contains the life force behind K, what Calvin believes rock’n’roll sounds like when living with the dead. Recorded in Olympia at the famed Dub Narcotic Studio with magikal production assistance from the likes of Fred Thomas and Karl Blau, Hewn from the Wilderness is the ultimate. It will be available to the general populace June 12 in digital downloadable, compact disc or LP phonograph record formats. For those who cannot wait that long (and honestly, who can wait to hear this gem?) the K Mail Order Dept. is offering to accept pre-orders for Hewn from the Wilderness to be sent off May 11, more than one month before the official release date!
and
Each pre-order (of any format) will immediately receive an MP3 of “Somebody’s Phone Is Ringing” by the Hive Dwellers, a special bonus single drawn from Hewn from the Wilderness [KLP241]. Your smile has got me reeling!
The Hive Dwellers‘ Evan Hashi and Gabriel Will with Katie from Every Thing Goes Book Cafe, Staten Island, N.Y.
The Curious Mystery In Residence!
Each Sunday all April long the Curious Mystery will be residing at the Ace Hotel in N.Y., N.Y., entrancing all with their haze-inducing blues soul psychedelic style. It is a real treat for Gotham, April in New York with a touch of Seattle magik. The recent Curious Mystery album We Creeling [KLP225] was recorded at Dub Narcotic Studio by Karl Blau; it has a sheen of bluesy psychedelia that weeps crayon colored tears. Feast the eyes on these shots of the Curious Mystery playing Easter Sunday in the lobby of the Ace:
- Shana thrumming the auto-harp-
-Johnny‘s elbow above the souvenir stand and double-necked electric sitar-
-M. tom-tom-riffic with Shana‘s elbow, too-
-Nic playing the electric sitar on the dinner table-
New Items from Our Friends and Neighbors!
Here are two LAKE related releases from some nearby label pals. The recent LAKE addition to our Dub Narcotic Disco Plate series, “Gravel”, backed by the Selector Dub Narcotic mix “Regrade” [DBN116], is still available from the K Mail Order Dept.
Skrill Meadow Hard Water CS (Gnar Tapes)
Markly Morrison began making homemade cassette albums under the moniker “Skrill Meadow” in 1999. Hailing from Lancaster, CA and currently residing in Olympia, WA, he continues the tradition when he has free time from other projects (LAKE, Lazer Zeppelin, Los Perros Calientes, Malaikat Dan Singa, etc.) This collection of songs finds SKRILL MEADOW combining his country stylings with club jams… I’ll call it COUNTRY CLUB.
Solid Home Life Solid Home Life LP
Solid Home Life is like the old lace that people used to make before there were machines, have you ever seen that stuff? It is a delicately woven together document of love, loss, and the mundane wrapped gently in a fiery and transcendent joy. Each track communicates personal messages from co-writers Lindsay Schief (LAKE) and Greg Olin (Graves). They are singing to each other, to others and luckily, to us. It feels as it may fall apart because it so fine, any misstep and the fabric would crumble. Nothing falls apart, and un-ironic charm moves each thread through the hoop. From the traditional folk structures to calypso rhythms, every track on Solid Home Life weaves a pattern that hooks the ear.