Artist of the Week : Lazer Crystal

Synthesized Chicago LAZER CRYSTAL is a musical node comprised of three humans and various mechanisms. Listening to their songs is like sending your mind on a trip around the universe.

In fact, singer/keyboardist Mikale De Graff says he hopes the disc, titled "MCMLXXX", takes people to a mental place where you can’t be in the physical world. And he says it’s OK for people to see Lazer Crystal as a riddle: “I think the puzzle is a good aspect of what music or art or conversation or whatever can be,” says De Graff, 30, a Kentucky native who has lived in Chicago since 2003. “Clarification is always nice too, but a little mystery can go a long way.”

Their music sprawl across Krautrock, Italo-disco, prog, and noise, and in keeping with those influences their payoff isn't in pop hooks so much as it is in really intense vibes. Even without much foreground melody, the music has a focus that Lazer Crystal's early material lacked—something De Graff and Read say they achieved by giving in to their electro and house fandom.

IN SHORT:
Lazer Crystal believes that we as humans are at the extreme promontory of the centuries. The human race has reached the moment where we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible to seek the unknown. We are moving beyond Time and Space toward the absolute, since we have discovered eternal, omnipresent speed.

OUR MISSION:
1. To create music that reflects this ideal.
2. To present a multi-colored, polyphonic surf of sound and vision, set to the ritual nocturnal vibrations of its arsenal, to be played as an offering of respite.

http://www.myspace.com/lazercrystal

Artist of the Week : BABY DEE

Biography

Performance artist, songwriter, classically trained harpist, circus sideshow veteran, and transgender street legend Baby Dee was born in 1953 in Cleveland, OH. She spent ten years as music director and organist for a Catholic church in the Bronx before joining the circus as the bilateral hermaphrodite at Coney Island. This landed her a gig as the bandleader for performance art group the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and a tour with the Kamikaze Freak Show in Europe. After moving back to New York City, she became a fixture in lower Manhattan with a street act on a high-rise tricycle with a concert harp. She recorded her first record, Little Window, on the Durtro label in 2000, a four-track EP in 2001, and her second full-length, the double-disc Love's Small Song, in 2002. Dee returned to Ohio during the latter record's recording, taking vows as a novitiate of the Little Sisters of Crabby Doom (a Cleveland-based order dedicated to the care of smelly old men), vows that she has since forsaken. For her third full-length recording, Dee recruited a typically eclectic army of fellow musicians, including Will Oldham, Andrew W.K., Robbie Lee, Max Moston (Antony and the Johnsons), Bill Breeze (Psychic TV), John Contreras (Current 93), James Lo (Chavez), and Lia Kessel. The resulting Safe Inside the Day arrived in January 2008 on Drag City Records. In 2010, Dee released A Book of Songs for Anne Marie, a lovingly detailed and orchestrated collection of harp and piano-based ballads. It was followed in 2011 by the Andrew W.K.-produced Regifted Light, which followed a similar course as its predecessor, though with a greater emphasis on instrumentals.

by James Christopher Monger

Thursday 22 September 2011 / Baby Dee (Live) / Start 21:00

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195511890504526

http://www.babydee.org/