Volunteer Park Pride, NW New Works Festival, Negroni Week, And More Picks For June 6-12
by Stranger Things To Do Staff
This week, our arts critics have recommended the best events in every genre—from the Volunteer Park Pride Festival to the free opening night of the Seattle Art Museum's new show, and from Beer Camp Across America to Elysian's 20th Anniversary show. See them all below, and find even more events on our complete Things To Do calendar.
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MONDAY
FOOD & DRINK
Negroni Week
The negroni is one of the world’s simplest, most perfect cocktails: Equal parts gin, Campari, and vermouth, stirred and garnished with an orange peel. It glows a gorgeous shade of purpley red, and tastes bitter, sweet, and floral all at once. During Negroni Week, which runs until June 12, bars across the world craft variations of the cocktail and donate one dollar from every drink sold directly to a charity of their choice. In Seattle, bars including Artusi, Rob Roy, Single Shot, Herb & Bitter Public House (and many more) are mixing negronis and pouring cash into organizations such Solid Ground, FareStart, Bailey-Boushay House, On the Boards, and Doctors Without Borders. Started in 2013 by Campari and Imbibe magazine, Negroni Week is most definitely a marketing ploy benefitting a global corporation. Feel free to plot the overthrow of our corporate power regime as you throw back another negroni. ANGELA GARBES (Through Sunday)
ART
SuttonBeresCuller with Sharon Arnold
This ArtTalk features artist, writer and gallerist Sharon Arnold (LxWxH) interviewing the Stranger Genius artist trio SuttonBeresCuller (John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zac Culler), who are known for their mobile sculptures, street art, site-specific installations, and participatory works.
FILM
Seattle International Film Festival
During the last week of the excellent 42nd annual SIFF, make sure not to miss Marzia, My Friend, Lamb, Awaiting, and The General. See all of the Stranger recommended films here.
MUSIC
Mirah and Jherek Bischoff
Two of the most versatile musical talents ever to call the Northwest their (former) home return in glory. Mirah began as a classic Olympia singer-songwriter with a one-of-a-kind voice and evolved into a fascinating, multilayered musician capable of thrilling big rooms and chilling tiny ones. Bischoff launched from the avant gardish work of the Dead Science into a universe of experimental composition (always with enough pop to keep it sweet) that has included collabs with the likes of David Byrne, Neil Gaiman, Zola Jesus, Amanda Palmer, Ariel Pink, Ben Folds, Vance Joy, Sondre Lerche, and, uh, Al Gore. Oh yeah, and Mirah. SEAN NELSON
Silversun Pickups
I first heard Silversun Pickups when their song “Panic Switch” was the only good thing about the trailer to the movie Sucker Punch. (Does anyone remember that movie?) After purchasing that record, Swoon, I discovered that the band had a less-than-stellar reputation in critical circles. Screw the critics, I later thought, watching the band open for Metallica in Detroit. They’re energetic and driving live, even though singer Brian Aubert has a somewhat delicate voice. Every one of their records has at least a handful of excellent chrome-plated-but-plaintive rock songs, and last year’s Better Nature is no different. JOSEPH SCHAFER
TUESDAY
PERFORMANCE
Paint Your Wagon
Lerner and Loewe's Paint Your Wagon is musical about a bunch of lovelorn, lonely, and gold-lusting '49ers getting into scrapes on their way out West. There's a lot of grab-your-hoe-and-off-we-go sing-a-longs, which are enlivening, but I have a soft spot for "I Was Born Under a Wand'ring Star," which kind of sounds like the Oompa Loompa theme but written and sung by Leonard Cohen. For the show, the 5th Ave. Theatre commissioned Jon Marans to freshen up the book, which should speed up the story. RICH SMITH (Through Sunday)
The Mystery of Love & Sex
A story of two parallel relationships happening across generations. Charlotte's relationship with her childhood best friend Johnny may be turning romantic while her parents' marriage begins to fall apart. (Through Sunday)
MUSIC
Laser Tribute to Prince: Birthday Memorial Shows
Keep on mourning Prince (and celebrating his legacy) with this birthday tribute, featuring special laser shows set to his music.
The Bad Plus
I often get the sense that modern jazz has a difficult time communicating with listeners who are not already steeped in the form. Much of the music can seem too cerebral and disconnected from wider culture, unless a listener has enough experience with the genre to appreciate its nuances. The Bad Plus neatly skirt this problem. For one, their taste in covers skews popular—they’ve included Radiohead in their set list, among other rock acts. For another, drummer Dave King plays with a manic physicality that injects copious nitro into the trio’s engine. JOSEPH SCHAFER (Through Wednesday)
The Stargazer Lilies
The Stargazer Lilies create textbook shoegaze rock that transports you to that idyllic mauve miasma that enveloped us in the early 1990s. Everything in their music is hazy and blurry and opiated and you can’t discern a dad-blasted lyric, but it doesn’t matter because you’re too busy swooning to and floating on the wispy bliss cloud composed of reverbed and chorused guitars and Kim Field’s distant, dulcet vocals. DAVE SEGAL
WEDNESDAY
READINGS & TALKS
Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi will read from her epic novel Homegoing, which tells the story of families in Ghana and “The New World” linked across 300 years of time, about which Ta-Nehisi Coates said, “I think I needed to remember what happens when you pair a gifted literary mind to an epic task. Homegoing is an inspiration.”
Beacon Bards Poetry Reading Series
At June's edition of the monthly poetry reading series featuring talented local poets, J.W. Marshall and Alexander Moysaenko will read.
PERFORMANCE
Stick Fly
Intiman Theatre Festival is kicking off its 2016 season, which will focus on U.S. plays written by black women, with Lydia R. Diamond's Stick Fly, a dramedy about an affluent black family living on Martha's Vineyard. Family ties begin to loosen when the sons bring their partners home to meet the fam. The two women—one a white Peace Corps volunteer who taught underprivileged children in the city; the other a black woman who grew up in a wealthy home—argue about the complexities of class, race, and unearned advantages. Over the course of all the butting-of-heads, promises are broken, confessions are made, and family secrets air out. Veteran Shakespearean actor G. Valmont Thomas plays the dad in this, and he's all the reason I need to see this. RICH SMITH (Through Sunday)
ART
Journey to Dunhuang: Buddhist Art of the Silk Road Caves
For 10 centuries, Silk Road travelers flowed through the western Chinese city of Dunhuang, bringing their art, their culture, and their religion—and building an entirely magical, living, and ever-changing cross-cultural museum inside caves they carved into cliffsides in the desert outside the city. The caves are still full of ancient paintings and sculptures. Tourists flock there today. But, in the middle of the 20th century, two young photojournalists traveled there to document and explore the place for months without the benefit of running water or electricity. They returned with photographs, fragments of ancient texts, and memories that later became full-color paintings of what they saw. Their expedition is the subject of Foong Ping’s thrilling exhibition in Seattle this summer; a sister show at the Getty in LA, organized by a team including former Seattle Art Museum director Mimi Gates, includes actual full-scale replicas of the miraculous caves. Every glimpse has the quality of a dream. JEN GRAVES (Closes Sunday)
FILM
SIFF Discussion with Charles Mudede
There are three documentaries whose importance and relevance is, in my opinion, so considerable that I have decided to hold a conversation about them at Vermillion Gallery on Wednesday, June 8. The three films are Presenting Princess Shaw, Sonita, and Marzia, My Friend. These documentaries (which concern young and poor women who live with very difficult pasts and are trying to take control of their futures) are connected in ways that deserve careful examination and deep discussion. CHARLES MUDEDE
MUSIC
At the Drive-In
This would be the second time Texan post-hardcore superstars At the Drive-In have reunited, following a brief festival tour in 2012. It’s also their first run without guitarist Jim Ward—guess they won’t be playing “Hourglass.” Original lineup or no, anytime At the Drive-In play, it’s a cause for celebration. Their final studio album, 2000’s Relationship of Command, has become a seminal record in their genre the same way that London Calling has come to exemplify classic punk, iconography and all. Those songs, in all their skittering, dissonant harmonic glory, were the product of a time when, for a minute, it looked like the curtain between commercial and experimental rock could drop. JOSEPH SCHAFER
Train perform Led Zeppelin II
Confession: Before writing this blurb, I’d never intentionally listened to Train. Confession II: Led Zeppelin II is ingrained in my DNA and I love it, because I’m a fiftysomething male from the American Midwest, where radio stations aired songs from it with OCD monomania. One of life’s certainties: Nobody really can improve on that album’s vertiginous, psychedelic blues rock. Scanning through Train’s best-known songs, I find them to be nondescript radio rock. The hubris required to tackle a classic of this magnitude is impressive. Not only are Train performing these immortal songs live, they’ve recorded LZII in its entirety. Injury, meet insult. Oh, wait. Train are donating all proceeds from album sales to San Francisco Family House, an organization that offers temporary housing to families of ill children. GGBB (good guys, bad band) rule in effect. Whole lotta love to you, gents. DAVE SEGAL
THURSDAY
ART
Graphic Masters: Free Opening Night
This is your chance to get in for free to see everything in the museum, including the big new show called Graphic Masters, which includes the following big-stuff stuff: R. Crumb’s version of the Book of Genesis, Goya’s entire Los caprichos, Hogarth's dissolute 18th century dotted with syphilis, Rembrandt being Rembrandt, Dürer being Dürer, and Picasso. And the opening party includes extras including a zine fair (zair?), a print fair, live jazz, a workshop in printmaking, and a mini-festival of animation. JEN GRAVES
Capitol Hill Art Walk: Queer Edition
The monthly Capitol Hill Art Walk is a great chance to explore the neighborhood, collect drinks, and (hopefully) soak up the sun. June is the queer edition (timed perfectly for Pride Month), so don't miss Welcome to the Taradome, a completely bananas collaborative art event intended to honor the great Tara Thomas, long-time Capitol Hill resident and void-surpassingly unique artist and creator Plus, don't miss Vermillion's 8-year anniversary party.
PERFORMANCE
Caught
I'd count Christopher Chen's Caught as one of the four smartest / powerfulest / provocativest straight plays I've seen in this town since I took on the job of theater critic back in November. The play is meta-theatrical, but in a meaningful way—less of a self-flagellating/self-congratulatory annoying ouroboros kind of thing and more of a flower blooming out of another flower kind of thing. It's about Western responses to Chinese dissident art. Sort of. It's also about relative pain. It's also about how the truth is a collaborative fiction, and about how nobody can really know anyone else. Importantly, it's about an hour and a half long, tops. Go see it. RICH SMITH (Through Sunday)
PNB: American Stories
PNB presents a trio of bouncy fun numbers from three massively influential choreographers: Fancy Free by Jerome Robbins, Square Dance by George Balanchine, and Waiting at the Station by Twyla Tharp. Combining classic movement with elements of swing, square, and tap dancing brings a distinctly American air to what's too often perceived as a stuffy genre. And if you get tipsy enough before the show, I'm willing to bet you might feel loose enough to engage in a little primo chair dancing—one of America's other great contributions to the world of dance. Also, Noelani Pantastico will be struttin' in all three pieces, and she's the fucking best. RICH SMITH (Through Sunday)
Divas Take the Hill
Capitol Hill will never slip away from its queer roots as long as the Divas are around to take it every year! Clear your calendar for Divas Take the Hill, an annual unofficial kickoff for Pride hosted by legends DonnaTella Howe and Miss Kitty, with the backing of Team Diva Real Estate. The burlesque and cabaret performances are bolstered this year with the inclusion of a drag king boy band called Infinite Directions. Proceeds benefit homeless youth services, so you can have a great time and feel great about having it. Everyone's going to be talking about this show for the rest of Pride month, and possibly until it rolls around again in 2017. MATT BAUME
9 Circles
Strawberry Theatre Workshop presents 9 Circles, a play by Bill Cain that likens the civilian trial of Steven Dale Green to the descent through Dante's nine circles of hell, directed by Greg Carter. (Through Saturday)
Whim W'Him: OUT-SPOKEN
OUT-SPOKEN is Whim W'Him Contemporary Dance's third program of the season, featuring choreography by James Gregg, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, and Olivier Wevers. The performances will be set to new, original music created specifically for each piece. (Through Saturday)
READINGS & TALKS
Panel Discussion: The Role of the Arts in Civic Problem Solving
This panel discussion is part of the programming surrounding Path with Art's exhibit We Are All Here on display at City Hall, and will feature Randy Engstrom (Director of the Office of Arts and Culture) speaking about the role of the arts in "civic problem solving."
MUSIC
Al Di Meola
Al Di Meola’s current show should give jazz-fusion geeks exactly what they want. Billed the “Elegant Gypsy Meets Romantic Warrior Electric Tour,” these performances will feature the flamboyant guitar hero in his most extravagantly expressive and rococo guises. His 1977 solo LP Elegant Gypsy flaunts fluid, swift leads that explore prog-rock and flamenco modes with great tenderness. More of Di Meola’s peak moments should come to vivid life via the tracks on Return to Forever’s 1976 fusion classic Romantic Warrior. The mercurial dynamics and piquant tones Di Meola conjures here rival those of his masterly collaborator, John McLaughlin. DAVE SEGAL
Here Comes the Kraken, Gorod, Seeker, Lack of Romance, the Devils of Loudun
It’s a bill akin to a United Nations of death metal, with sounds almost as quarrelsome as a gathering of the international governing body in question. Steel yourself for some pan-global gutturalness when Mexico’s Here Comes the Kraken lead an intercontinental lineup that demonstrates that vomitous vocals and a gut-roiling bottom end know no borders. The headliners come heavy with the seismic riffs and sense of humor alike (one of their more popular jams is “The Legend of the Rent Is Way Hardcore,” true that). They’re joined by France’s technically accomplished extremists Gorod, Texas’s meat-and-potato brutalists Seeker, Seattle’s equally symphonic and caustic Devils of Loudon, and south-of-the-border “bacon metal” pioneers Lack of Remorse. Mmmmmm, evil. JASON BRACELIN
Sam Mickens
You may remember former Seattle singer/guitarist Sam Mickens from his days fronting peculiar art rockers the Dead Science. He moved to New York City in 2008 and ever since has been on his solo-career grind, first in America’s toughest metropolis and more recently in Los Angeles. His high-pitched, vibrato-heavy vocal style has drawn comparisons to sainted jazz crooner Jimmy Scott and Shudder to Think’s Craig Wedren, and as a composer, Mickens finds a happy medium between electronic pop-soul accessibility and byzantine orch-rock flourishes, while traversing other eccentric ground in between. Mickens aims high, and if he doesn’t always smash it, he’s keeping it interesting in unorthodox ways. Ziemba’s 2016 debut album, Hope Is Never, showcases her gorgeous, multilayered vocals in various modes: vaporous choral splendor, new-wave chanteuse, Nico-esque brooder circa Desertshore, bravura Judy Henske–like crooner à la Farewell Aldebaran, wrenching Dusty Springfield–ian balladeer. She sounds authoritative in every one of them. A star is busy being born. DAVE SEGAL
YG
When first we met YG in 2010, he was wearing a Coogi sweater and boasting about his “magic stick” on the radio-friendly single “Toot It and Boot It.” With his 2014 debut full-length, My Krazy Life, the Compton rapper (with lots of help from producer DJ Mustard) delivered a solid album faithful to the sounds and themes of ’90s gangsta rap. “I can’t die,” YG declared a year before getting shot outside of an LA recording studio, “I got too much to live for.” In advance of the delayed release of his follow-up, Still Krazy, YG has stayed busy—and admirably political. He lent legitimacy to Macklemore’s best attempt at hardness (a track called, um, “Bolo Tie”), dropping a verse indicting the media for ignoring rappers’ positive cultural contributions. Most recently, with rapper Nipsey Hussle, he released a song we can all get down with: “Fuck Donald Trump.” Its message—and YG himself—becomes more nuanced the longer you listen. ANGELA GARBES
FRIDAY
PERFORMANCE
NW New Works Festival 2016
Mandatory. NW New Works gives you a snapshot of all the performance/theater/dance you're going to be talking about a year from now. Some stuff is in-progress. Some stuff is close to done. Some stuff is the best. Some stuff is ???. But part of the joy is figuring out which performance has the most potential to become the next mind-melting, genre-altering thing that will emerge from this region and conquer the rest of the country.... I see no other choice but to block off both weekends. RICH SMITH (Through Sunday)
Cherdonna Shinatra: Clock that Mug or Dusted
The inexplicable, fascinating, "female impersonator impersonator" Cherdonna Shinatra (Jody Kuehner) performs an homage to feminist performance artists including Anna Halprin and Janine Antoni. (Through Sunday)
READINGS & TALKS
Seattle Fiction Federation #7
Seattle Fiction Federation's first reading at the Hugo House’s new space features Jessica Mooney (APRIL/Seattle Review of Books contest winner), Julie Trimingham (Way Elsewhere), Erika Brumett (Scrap Metal Sky), and SFF#6 winner Crystaline Brown.
FOOD & DRINK
Le Gourmand June Cooking Class
A three hour cooking class with Bruce Naftaly, where you'll work with seasonal ingredients including strawberries, roses, Montmorency cherries, gooseberries, cèpes, plum cots, mulberries, and pink singing scallops. (Through Sunday)
ART
Strange Coupling 2016
Strange Coupling is a juried exhibition featuring twelve collaborations between UW student artists and local working artists, encouraging creative teamwork and direct engagement with the Seattle arts scene. The Stranger's own Jen Graves was part of the jury team that made the marriages, and she's as curious as you are about what the art-babies they went on to make.
MUSIC
David Bazan
David Bazan’s downfall is also his greatest virtue: a deeply misanthropic consistency that makes you groan with impatience as much as you nod your head in agreement. His latest album, Blanco, incorporates a mirrored synth effect that is a new aesthetic for his solo work, but somehow easily folds itself into this weathered canvas, as its referential palette of Pac-Man bleep-bloops serves to give an almost earnestly youthful and truly rather tender feel to what otherwise would be deeply depressing bowling-alley poetry. This noted production change from his work of 2011 to now (while still maintaining his staunchly linear emotional context) is really just a manifestation of relief: that of all the David Bazans in the world, he continues to be the David Bazaniest. KIM SELLING
Luke Fitzpatrick
I wish I knew more about Luke Fitzpatrick! Heck, I wish I knew Luke Fitzpatrick. He’s got a violin. He’s got a looper. He’s got all kinds of stuff in his arsenal. He studies at the UW. He’s played Steve Reich (check him out on YouTube doing Reich’s “Violin Phase”). He’s participated in a live performance of Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” down in California, and no, I have no idea how anyone who does that might preserve sanity or, simply, hearing. Here it’ll be just him, his violin, and his electric ordnance. According to the website: “Works include ‘Anthèmes 2’ by Pierre Boulez and ‘Frises’ by Kaija Saariaho. The concert will also feature newly commissioned works by Doug Niemela, Jacob Sundstrom, Ania Stachurska, and Jeff Bowen.” ANDREW HAMLIN
Metal Church, Armored Saint, Substratum, Slamshifter, Sin Circus
There’s a tendency among metal enthusiasts to treat the genre kind of like an education. The more historic and obscure a band is, and the better you know them, the higher your standardized test score, or something. It’s dumb, but seeing Metal Church and Armored Saint is kind of like taking AP calculus. This is some deep, advanced shit. Locals Metal Church just reunited with fan-favorite singer Mike Howe. Meanwhile, Armored Saint vocalist John Bush is back in his original group after a long stint as the only good member in Anthrax. Openers Substratum are honors students. They’re keeping the sound of vintage heavy music alive and doing it better than most of their inspirations. JOSEPH SCHAFER
Superheaven, Creepoid, the Spirit of the Beehive, Hiding Place
Over the past five years, a handful of bands have sprung from the basements of the East Coast underground hardcore scene that sound more like Third Eye Blind than, say, Madball or Hatebreed. At the top of the heap is the shoe-gazing and super popular Title Fight, but just a couple steps under them is Pennsylvania based band Superheaven (formerly known as Daylight). Listen to their latest release and first LP under their new name, 2015’s incredibly catchy Ours Is Chrome, and try not to reminisce about the days before the word “emo” was an insult. It’s damn near impossible. KEVIN DIERS
SATURDAY
FESTIVALS
Volunteer Park Pride Festival
This year’s Pride Fest boasts a strong, diverse musical lineup, thanks to former Chop Suey talent buyer Jodi Ecklund’s curation. Among the sonic treats: the newest project by badass ex-Seven Year Bitch vocalist Selene Vigil (Selene Vigil et Amicis), whose slashing punk bravado keeps her old band’s torch blazing; all-femme AC/DC tribute band Hell’s Belles’ metallic KOs; Boyfriends’ gently delirious and twisted Wedding Present-esque pop; and Aeon Fux’s eccentric and electronic “doom-soul” songcraft. Local LGBTQIA folks get all of this, plus a vintage and local crafts bazaar overseen by Indian Summer proprietor Adria Garcia, artist booths, food trucks, and more. DAVE SEGAL
FOOD & DRINK
Beer Camp Across America
Sierra Nevada's traveling beer festival comes to Seattle. There will be hundreds of regional craft beers to try, live music from Deep Sea Diver, and food trucks including Off the Rez and Skillet Truck.
ART
Georgetown Carnival
Watch circus performers, acrobats, musicians, and artists of all kinds come together at this multidisciplinary festival that also promises games, food, and strange carnival fun.
Melanie Noel
This artist talk/lecture series organized by Hami Bohadori and Matt Bell promises a take on the intersection of commercial and academic art through a variety of forms of communication, from performances and presentations to lectures and "beneficial experiences." This time, hear from Melanie Noel (The Monarchs) who "sometimes leads experiential workshops meant to invoke synesthesia and an altered sense of scale."
MUSIC
Adia Victoria, Sam Russell & the Harborrats, Abraham
“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Southern belles, but I can tell ya ’bout Southern hell,” Adia Victoria sings lightly and melodically over a hazy, menacing blues guitar line on “Stuck in the South” from her debut album, Beyond the Bloodhounds. It’s the sort of album that seeps into your tissue and fascia and then shakes you from the inside out. Comparisons to other artists are lame and reductive, I know, but Victoria’s vocals take me back to early Cat Power records, and her screaming guitar makes me want to drag my body across a dirt floor the way PJ Harvey’s does. The similarities go beyond sound, to the spell-like manner in which these women entirely transport you to their singular worlds. Victoria’s interior Southern soundscape has range, drawing from country and pop, but it also reaches back, deep and far, through darkness—to muddy Mississippi Delta blues, yes, but also the dusty groans of the genre’s West African roots. Go to this show and you’ll probably be haunted for days. ANGELA GARBES
Elysian 20th Anniversary Show
They aren’t exactly known for live shows, but Elysian Brewery has pulled out all the stops for their 20th anniversary celebration. At a time when other beloved bars have bitten the dust, the company has managed to survive and thrive. They began life on Capitol Hill before expanding to four locations plus a brewery. Their Seattle Center blowout plays like a miniature summer fest with a mix of punk, garage rock, noise pop, and dance music. The last time Atlanta’s Black Lips played town, they left the Neumos stage a beer- and toilet-paper-strewn mess, so anything could happen on their return. The Raveonettes, the Gits (with Rachel Flotard), the Ming City Rockers, and the invaluable DJ Riz round out this multifaceted bill. KATHY FENNESSY
Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires
On “Flags!”—an exclamatory evisceration of reflexively pledging allegiance to one’s country over one’s fellow man—Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires unfurled one of the most assaultive guitar jams in recent years. The song, taken from the group’s 2014 Sub Pop debut, Dereconstructed, packed all the heat of the band’s namesake, embracing and subverting Southern rock tradition in a blaze of feedbacking amplifiers and blood- and sweat-streaked fret boards. Bains, an Alabama native and former member of Tuscaloosa rockers the Dexateens, sings of the meth labs and magnolias native to where he comes from, pride and revulsion comingling like the stars and bars on Old Glory. JASON BRACELIN
Nacho Picasso, Avatar Darko, Ugly Frank, SiqFux, Sneak Guapo
Nacho Picasso fulfills all the emotional dichotomies you need for Seattle’s rap scene: seducing you with synchronistic vocal talent, deep B-side humor, and a low-key approach to darker themes of abandonment and trauma cycles, meanwhile throwing down some gnarly gang-bang groupie line and casually smirking at it all. Pair up such energy with that of Avatar Darko’s more heavy-handed and candidly sincere king-of-the-hood style that’s hard to question since all the kid wants is to hang on a beanbag full of nugs and live out the American dream of all immigrant families that’s really just a many-headed Hydra of ways to disappoint (yet corporeally imbue) your closet of post-Soviet ghosts. KIM SELLING
Sandrider, Absolute Monarchs, Gaytheist, Blood Drugs, Merso
Seattle has a long history of underground rock music, and there have always been local record labels to help drag our subterranean artists into the sunlight. But you can’t really pick up a new album bearing the Sub Pop stamp these days and know with absolute certainty you’re going to get some surly Puget Sound miscreants beating on their instruments at top volume. For that kind of grimy consistency, you’re better off following Good to Die Records. Starting with the debut album by the now defunct post-punk and sludge hybrid outfit Absolute Monarchs, Good to Die established a roster of some of the most heavy, idiosyncratic, and sardonic bands of the Northwest. Tonight they celebrate their fifth anniversary with an Absolute Monarchs reunion and sets by all their excellent active bands. BRIAN COOK
Seattle Modern Orchestra: Discrete Infinity
Seattle Modern Orchestra, in its season finale, hosts composer Anthony Cheung in residency for the US premiere of his 2011 piece, Discrete Infinity, which borrows its name from Chomsky’s The Architecture of Language. Themes explored within the piece include the dichotomy of infinite possibilities of expression with a finite material like language.
Voivod, King Parrot, Child Bite, Heiress, Sanction VIII, Eye of Nix
It may be fightin’ words to a LOT of heads, BUT I’d reckon Voivod are one of the most important metal bands of the 1980s. For me, having first heard them in the mid-’80s, they’ve always been something of a proper crossover band, like what the punters would now consider “next level.” Shit, in 1986, they were literally post-hardcore. Voivod’s dissonant, atmospheric, and THICK guitar sound, Snake’s throaty holler, and their proggy progressions gave focus to many of the burned-out first-wave hardcore bands like, say, Die Kreuzen, which were feeling out of place in the underground. As for tonight’s show, it’s my understanding they’ll be raging on both their new and old jams!! Oh, I should mention that Child Bite, who are on tonight’s bill, are a fucking entertaining bunch’a weirdos!! MIKE NIPPER
SUNDAY
READINGS & TALKS
Our Circle of Breath
Alan Chong Lau has been hosting interdisciplinary arts events forever, mostly at KOBOSeattle. He's been the arts editor at the International Examiner for over three decades, he held the mayor-appointed title of Cultural Ambassador in 2014, and he's also one hell of a grocer—so he knows everybody. At his events, the ideas and gestures contained in music, visual art, and literature bounce off of each other and create an intellectually stimulating and generally easygoing environment, one that challenges your expectations of readings, art shows, and concerts. This time he's got Don Mee Choi reading from her powerful new book of poetry, Hardly War, which is a collage of her father's war photography, her own prose poems and poem-poems, postcards, untranslated Korean, theory from writers like Deleuze and Barthes, musical scores, and opera. With any luck, as she reads she'll project photos her father took during the wars in Korea and Vietnam. UW prof Stuart Dempster will work in some improvised trombone/didgeridoo, and John Levy will read poems accompanied by projected drawings from Donald Cole. RICH SMITH
PERFORMANCE
PNB: Season Encore Performance
Did you fail to see the Pacific Northwest Ballet's 2015-2016 season? Did you catch every show and now long to relive them? See the season's highlights at this one-night-only show, featuring crowd-pleasers including George Balanchine's The Nutcracker and Twyla Tharp's Waiting for the Station.
MUSIC
Daikaiju
I don’t know that I can do any better describing Daikaiju than they can. Brace yourselves. Braced? “WHO IS THE DAIKAIJU??? PREMIUM ACTION HEROES DELIVER MOST HIGH ROCKET ATTACK!!! SPECIAL REVERB SKILL COMBO FOR FULL IMPACT!!! LOUD SONIC BOOM FOR EARFUL PLEASURE!!! BEAUTIFUL RADIATION OF HYPER-DIMENSIONAL SPRINGY SOUND MAKING DIVINE PSYCHIC WIND FOR YOUR SPECIAL DEFENSE!!! WORSHIP DAIKAIJU DAILY FOR GOOD LUCK AND HEALTH!!!” If you want more help, they sound sort of like surf music and sort of like flying-saucer-movie music. They may not be Japanese (I’m still not sure), but they’re sure trying hard. Geist and the Sacred Ensemble bring their country-and-western doom metal to boot. ANDREW HAMLIN