I’m tempted to label this show ‘challenging,’ for a couple of reasons. Firstly there’s the purely logistical challenge of standing on cold concrete to take in full sets by five different bands. If you count set-up, performance, and take-down, each set averages out to roughly an hour in duration.

On a more casual platform (i.e. my blog) I described the aggregate of the genres on display Saturday night as “jazz-influenced mostly-instrumental avant-punk” (except for White Hills, who could be pretty straight-forwardly described as ‘psych’, unless you think psych is dead, in which case they can be called ‘neo-psych’). If anybody who is a fan of these bands is reading right now they’re probably scoffing at my designation of ‘challenging’ in the first place and maybe they’ve stopped reading now that I said that thing about avant-punk up there. But at one point I was standing along the wall near the door waiting for Jonas Reinhardt to go on and I noticed this older, clean-cut, jogging-shoes-wearing dude talking to these two well-underage kids who were there, and I realized that he was one of those kid’s dad. And as he leaned back against the wall beside me and checked his watch and stuck his earplugs back in when JR began their set, I had to consider things from his perspective; I thought to myself, ‘this shit must sound weird as hell and this scene must look weird as hell to somebody without a strong frame of reference.’ Same thing happened to me as I was watching Gran Torino; I began to see the world from an older person’s perspective. Horrors. 

      Anyhow, there was a show. White Hills was a loud and effective examination of the art of the crescendo. Soft Circle was an occasionally mind-blowing display of what one man and modern technology can accomplish within a live setting. Arp was a dreamy segue during which time many people decided to talk/stretch their legs/go to the bathroom. Jonas Reinhardt made some people dance even while the drummer spent a few minutes wandering around backstage looking for another kick for his bass drum. Aa seem to be popular enough in BK that I don’t feel especially bad for bailing early and missing most of their swirling circle of drums and screams and therefore having not much to say about them except, Wish I coulda toughed it out, dudes.