Hi folks,
My apologies for the lack of blogging lately. I’ve been
getting ready for the tour I find myself currently enmeshed in, traveling the
East Coast and Midwest for three weeks with my friend Sebastian, aka Proud
Father, from the ruins of New Orleans.
As tours go, three days in everything is kosher and still
fresh and fun, though I know exhaustion looms on the horizon like the
scaffolding of some ominous pirate ship cruising hazardous waters. Our first
day was spent in Greenville, NC at Rat & Slug, one of my favorite houses to
play (and partially run by a friend from back home).
Rat & Slug is your typical punk house, a bit dirty (as
the name implies), a bit precarious and crumbling, but warm and inviting
nonetheless, a collapsing old house near campus surrounded by waves of
wandering cats. My good friend Charles Wright offered blistering waves of harsh
noise and destruction in a performance that left a lot of us jaw-dropped.
Charles always seems to ‘trance in’ to his music, sipping tea and lighting
incense while building stunning walls of pure sound fury. This was by far the
most intense set of his I’ve seen, culminating in the demolition of a guitar
neck violently hitting a metal canister. Our own sets went as well as first
nights of a tour tend to do, a few minor equipment issues aside, and the night
descended into DJ’ing and revelry. Rat & Slug is the perfect sort of
low-key, friendly environment in which to begin a tour.
After a night on a floor we rolled back west for a stop at
Scrap Exchange in Durham, my favorite junk store. Having gathered some amazing
VHS/cassettes for sampling, and even a few gorgeous 35mm slides of a forested
cemetery somewhere, we moved on to Richmond, Virginia, one of the most flat-out
beautiful cities on the planet and one of my favorite places to play. The
corner coffee shop we always begin our East Coast tours at is Globehopper, and
it’s one of those half-discovered miracles of city life with delicious food and
drink tucked away in an intriguing part of town. Another easy pair of sets and
a little vegetarian Chinese food later, we drove north into the vast night to
spend it on sleeping bags beneath giant oaks at a KOA Kampground near
Fredericksburg.
Now we’re in the lovely, apple-obsessed mountain town of
Winchester, Virginia, awaiting a show at Winchester Book Gallery (seriously,
one of the most incredibly stocked book/record/video stores of all time)
tonight with old friends Christopher Feltner and Guillermo Pizarro, two noise
folks we’ve hosted in Burlington before. We’ve got a lot of time to kill in
these pretty little town, so I’ll catch you folks later. Till then, ZC
PS - Photos pending. Already hit a sweet semi-abandoned stockyard and an abandoned house.
PS - Photos pending. Already hit a sweet semi-abandoned stockyard and an abandoned house.
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