Wild Nothing

with Deakin

Doors at 7pm, all ages

Because “Hold,” Jack Tatum’s fifth album under the moniker Wild Nothing, was written in the aftermath of new parenthood during the pandemic, it was probably inevitable that it would be searching and existential music. But during the recording process, the artist known for synth-pop tastefulness took it as an opportunity to reach for a new sonic maximalism and wider set of influences.

With contributions from longtime collaborator Jorge Elbrecht, Tommy Davidson of Beach Fossils and Hatchie’s Harriette Pilbeam, first single “Headlights On” features an acid house-worthy bass groove and breakbeat that prove Tatum is playing for the rafters.

But that club ambiance is misdirection. “It’s a fun song, but lyrically, it’s about my wife and I going through one of the worst times in our relationship,” Tatum said. “I don’t know why, but I’ve always been so drawn to these kinds of juxtapositions and striking these balances.”

Tatum produced the rest of the record on his own, partially out of necessity, due to the challenges of the pandemic. “More than anything, this record reminded me of working on my first LP. Just truly being holed up in this room, alone with no input for such a long time,” he said. The songs were eventually brought to Adrian Olsen at Montrose Recording in Richmond to begin recording drums and filling in the gaps. While largely a product of isolation, Hold also reflects the things Tatum has learned from collaborators, both on previous records and during his acclaimed work with Japanese Breakfast and Molly Burch.

The rest of the record was mixed by Geoff Swan, who listeners might know for his work with Caroline Polachek and Charli XCX. “I reached out to Geoff because I wanted to find someone that could help me make this sound as big as possible,” he said. “I’ve always been very inspired by and attracted to big tent ’80s acts. Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush are two of my biggest influences ever because they clearly never shied away from that kind of ambition.” Swan put Tatum’s vocals high in the mix, and throughout the album, he embraces playful vocal processing like never before.

On “Basement El Dorado,” he sings about searching for heaven in a ruined world. “It’s a little bratty, but it’s also really about genuinely wishing there was a heaven—wouldn’t it be nice?” he said. “I didn’t want to get too heavy-handed about global warming and how the world is on fire, but I still wanted to get at the idea that this is what we’ve got. At least that’s how I view it. Heaven is a place on earth, and this is all we have.”

Prewn

with Pearl Sugar

If Izzy Hagerup’s new album, System, feels immediately uncompromising it’s because it was never really designed for public consumption. Released under her Prewn moniker, Hagerup describes the album as a “private journal made public.” The arresting nine songs on System chronicle a deeply personal journey through the darkness of depression, but one that’s always undercut by moments of humor as well as selfishness and self-reflection–a push-and-pull that feels wholly distinctive.

Following on Prewn’s 2023’s debut album Through The Window–a collection of songs that Pitchfork hailed as a “striking example of Hagerup’s ability to sit with ugliness”–System finds her crawling even deeper into the dense folds of the night. Hagerup alone wrote and recorded the album, mostly in long stretches of bedroom sessions that found her working through the night until she began to hear birdsong. System reckons with a lot of the thoughts that tend to needle in during those small hours: guilt, shame, and self-absorption, as well as the societal pressures that sit at the root of such things.

“This new album comes from a much more self-centered place, the stagnant aftermath of intensity and emotion,” Hagerup says. “I think it came from a period of time that was more numb, hollow, and confused. More disassociated from heartfelt pain, more entrenched in a frustrating and aimless discomfort.”

That discomfort manifests itself in various ways throughout System. Each of the songs were a result of random inspiration, and find Hagerup working out of a desperation to record the pieces before the inspiration slipped through her fingers. “I feel in a constant state of writer’s block but I just put myself in the studio for hours and hours, sometimes in agony and desperation for any muse at all,” she explains. “Every once in a blue moon, a nugget gets thrown my way and I run as far as I can with it.”

The result is a wildly unique album that carries a sense of restlessness and unease in its bones, but also pulls the curtain back on what it takes and what it means to fully explore the self through song. “It seems that misery’s my best friend. I know it’ll come to me again and again…” Hagerup sings on the title track. Written while feeling acutely overwhelmed in a sea of people, the song touches upon everything from the mechanisms of the music industry, to cycles of depression, to the seemingly never-ending battle to escape the clutches of the patriarchy and capitalism. “When I wrote it I was supposed to be present and alive and gracious and happy. But somehow I couldn’t escape my own internal fears and depression that can follow me wherever I go,” she says.

Pulling together a number of the System’s key sentiments, “Dirty Dog” is like an intense fever dream–a song where the listener can never quite find their footing within the glitchy, malaise-like backdrop of its scorched instrumentation. Hagerup says. “I think a large continuity of the songs lies in the amateur quality of them. I’m a sucker for an imperfect recording.” Such sentiments bristle throughout “Dirty Dog,” shaping it into something prickly and unilluminated in a way that feels almost radical

Cola
w/ PARKiNG

C.O.L.A. is sort of a self-titled album. It’s an acronym for Cost of Living Adjustment, a fitting conceptual framework for the band’s third record. Why? Because C.O.L.A. considers, among other things, socialism vs. hell. It considers: rolling the dice of life. The eerie and sweet pangs that nostalgia can provoke. This is not new territory for band members Tim Darcy, Evan Cartwright, and Ben Stidworthy. It is, in Cartwright’s words “a deepening of what we’ve been doing.” C.O.L.A. is an intricate, beautiful, and sometimes strange record. It is the band’s most refined offering. A perfection of carefully honed aesthetic impulses.

Cola, as a band, says Darcy is defined by its “tasteful minimalism.” A deep appreciation for making music that is romantic, subtle, and deceptively intense. C.O.L.A., however, is the band’s most maximalist work to date. This is a little tongue and cheek (“We were so worried,” says Cartwright, “About all the songs on this record being too different”). In practice, this maximalism means that a song like “Hedgesitting,” has both live drums and a sample drum loop. “Hedgesitting,” is a gorgeous, lush song. It’s like a deconstructed, chopped & screwed b-side from the Cure’s Disintegration. It’s also a little indebted to Sarah Records. “When you were young,” Darcy sings at the song’s start, “you came to make it.”

C.O.L.A., like everything written by the band, is inherently collaborative. The band writes everything separately, then comes together and works in the studio. Look again to “Hedgesetting,” to see this in action, which started out with chords that Darcy had sent, then the band expanded it together, with Stidworthy remixing it right before heading to the studio. This division of labor works intuitively. It is a part of the band’s DNA to say, take an arrangement Stidworthy wrote, and then have Darcy and Cartwright build upon it. Take “Favoured Over the Ride,” as an example. “I wanted to create a dusky, melancholy palette for Tim to write lyrics for,” says Stidworthy. The song starts with a lonely, dreamy guitar riff. Then there’s a crisp line of bass and it all comes into focus: “What’s on the ceiling that’s caught your gaze?” sings Darcy. It’s a moment of clarity on a record that is interested abstraction. C.O.L.A. is full of these clarifying moments: where a whole swirl of feelings become so clear that it almost hurts a little bit.

***

PORTRAiTS, the debut full-length from Kentucky-based art-rockers PARKiNG, captures this unforgiving sense of dread, unease, and mania with haunting accuracy. Its sprawling and oftentimes politically charged sound is a perfect fit for the ledge, for the cusp of collapse, and for the dreadful isolation of twenty-first-century America. Spanning ten tracks and clocking in at nearly forty-five minutes, ‘PORTRAiTS’ features pulsating post-punk explosions, haunting orchestral abstractions, and fresh takes on the last half century of art and noise rock.

Shannon Shaw Band w/ Georgia Maq

***

Powerhouse singer and bassist Shannon Shaw released her acclaimed solo debut, Shannon in Nashville, in 2018 on Easy Eye Sound. Produced by Dan Auerbach, the album showcased Shaw’s soaring, soul-baring vocals through a cinematic blend of vintage pop, country soul, and heartbreak balladry.

Since its release, Shaw has toured internationally in support of the album, including dates opening for John Prine and touring alongside Neko Case. She has also remained a constant presence onstage with her celebrated bands Shannon and the Clams and Hunx and His Punx.

The album was hailed by numerous publications, with Pitchfork describing it as “a diamond” that “sounds like Roy Orbison and his musicians lost in the Brill Building.”

***

Georgia Maq became something of a local hero as the leader of revered punk trio Camp Cope, calling out music industry sexism over fearsome indie rock salvos while garnering widespread international acclaim. In late 2019, Maq surprised everyone by releasing her solo debut, Pleaser, a refreshingly bright and catchy missive of electro-pop tunes about heartbreak and love. A suite of singles in ‘Someone Stranger’ with Alice Ivy, ‘Joe Rogan’, ‘tropical lush ice’ and live EP recorded at the Sydney Opera House showcase the breadth of her taste and range.

Ever since, Georgia has chased a more genuine form of pop music in her solo career, a vision hat retains all of the glamour and universality but feels unburdened from capitalist underpinnings. Mining the evergreen themes of romantic, sexual and self-love, Georgia Maq’s solo venture was not so much a transformation as it was a revelation. Opening up on her vulnerabilities and heartbreaks, her continued evolution is far beyond the Greek girl from Naarm that first set fire to the rain.

LIVE (A-Z)
Bella Hayes | @watertunnelfly
Commitment | @commitment.phl
Cry | @relaxerelaxer @kilbourne2themax
Lip Critic | @lipcritic
Loose Leash | @looseleashmusic
Matmos | @xmatmosx
More Clowns | @flyenters @allegedlymusic
Naoco Wowsugi | @wowsugi
Polarview | @polarview1
Roost.World | @roost.world
Slug Beat | @slug_zone
Show Me The Body | @showmethebody
Spiral Generator | @spiralgenerator
Subwoofer Duo |
Tongue Depressor | @tongue___depressor
Total Wife | @totalwife
Qiujiang Levi Lu | @levi.lu1

Zap Outdoorz is a festival that brings together top electronic and punk acts from the DMV plus out-of-region favorites for a weekend campout in Appalachia. Our mission is to bridge worlds and move bodies, embrace our raw edges as humans, and ignite our collective energy. Organic by nature and intimate by design, we are at once a reverie and a homecoming, an annual celebration of what has been, what is, and what ought to be.

Weekend highlights include a pool party takeover, lakeside tunes, DJs until sunrise, daytime experimental, wellness activities, and killer bands smashed in the middle of it all. The ethos of ZAP is homegrown and handspun.

Camp Tall Timbers has been a longstanding family-owned children's summer camp for over fifty years. We ask that you treat this place with the same care and respect as you would your own home. The property offers exceptional natural surroundings in a peaceful, secluded location away from residential areas.

Please be aware that reaching the camp involves navigating winding roads, so try to arrive during daylight hours. Approximately a mile and a half from the property, there is a gun range where gunfire may be heard in the late morning. If you have any concerns or specific questions regarding this, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

9 Million Fest, featuring…

9 Million

Aunt Katrina

Polarview (last show!)

Roxy 2

Geeker

Bubbler

Doors at 5pm, show at 6pm

All ages

Sunshine Only Sometimes: Archives Vol. 2, 1972–1975 continues Anthology Recordings’ excavation, and exploration, of southern singer, songwriter, and psychedelic serviceman Robert Lester Folsom’s bountiful archives. Recorded across Georgia in various bedrooms, a barn, and a motel room with a reel-to-reel and a revolving cast of whip smart studio musicians in the first half of a dazed and confused decade, Sunshine Only Sometimes furthers Folsom’s place in the canon of long lost but eventually found independently spirited, high-flying American folk rock.

When Anthology’s reissue of Music and Dreams, the sole contemporaneous album released in 1976 by Folsom, surfaced in 2010, little else was known of Folsom’s nearly five-decade deep archive of unreleased demos and fully formed studio recordings. Born and raised in Adel, Georgia—both then, and now, a sleepy hamlet with a population of less than 5,000—Folsom was fortunate to be minded after extremely supportive parents. Exhibiting a precocious affinity for music, things went widescreen when he observed the same ferry from ‘cross the Mersey as many others of his generation, carrying the four musical moptops to their paradigm shifting appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Soon thereafter, Folsom began religiously absorbing every morsel of musical output The Fab Four offered, as well as that of their contemporaries. Yet, it wasn’t long before observation transformed into a motivation to create. Even a children’s record player bought by his parents as a gift to him was traded off to a neighborhood friend for a stringless, disheveled guitar (which Folsom’s father shined to prime and function for him in short order). As time went on, Folsom’s innate drive and field of vision broadened; he began enlisting neighborhood friends, classmates, and family members to fulfill his small-scale musical dreams, which would increase in weight with the passage of days.

Over the next several years, while employing ingenious, home brewed over-dubbing techniques with his “love at first sight,” a Sears 3440 two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, Folsom served as the de facto producer/arranger for any and all scrappy garage band or aspiring singer songwriter in the radius of Adel. Abetted by his mobile recording unit, across a number of unusual locations, and assisted by guitarist and collaborator Hans VanBrackle, this period produced the bounty of Folsom’s self-penned compositions which make up Ode to a Rainy Day and Sunshine Only Sometimes. And eventually, this period of woodshedding led to the formation of his rural-tinged, progressive, southern rock outfit Abacus. Though carrying Folsom’s own singular sound and vision, Music and Dreams, in equal measure, chartered the seas of smooth West Coast AOR before the yachts to come, while tracing the distinctly Californian sound of Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter soft rock Americana, which tussled on the waters before the large vessels overtook the big blue. Folsom’s earlier compositions found on Sunshine Only Sometimes reflect a darker-hued mixture of mellow folk, downer vibes, and rural tones, revealing his talent for melody and hook was intact far before Music and Dreams, with a keen sense of introspection making the dark and light equally resonant. Sunshine Only Sometimes offers up another sterling set of tonally-shifting, sub-underground, alternate timeline classic rock. The C&W-influenced, sprightly-pop of George Harrison—whose Dark Horse Records is one of a handful of record companies Folsom and VanBrackle submitted demos to—is invoked in the uber-melodic “Ease My Mind.” “Julie” brings to mind Nixon-era ragged ‘n’ ramshackled country-blues from the Glimmer Twins’ pen, and the semi-acoustic, heavily-flanged, out-of-time psych-pop of “Lonely Lovers” sits somewhere between a forward-looking glimpse at Music and Dreams and a demo from a would-be Cosmic American Music king.

Unlike similar iconoclasts with crystal vision who held forth with the oppressive thumb of a musical dictator, Folsom was ever in service of song, standing equally aside his collaborators, which uniformly engendered affinity and respect lasting to this day. While a tick higher than the second-tier, the mountaintop was always narrowly out his grasp. Though, with the right set of opportunities, bolstered by talent and drive, Folsom, if not as a stand-alone, star-quality artist, could have led the career of any number of songwriters behind the curtain who rode the magical musical continuum across the decades with faceless success. Perhaps it was Robert and company’s playing “weird spacey stuff and ballads,” as guitarist VanBrackle describes, in small town Georgia skating rinks, bowling alleys, and school dances expecting Top 40 dance-ready hits which held them down. Perhaps it was simply location. Though, the music of Sunshine Only Sometimes is composed of an intrinsic ability to hear the music truly playing, as opposed to the space in air heard by the lay-ear, which places Folsom’s music in a timeless space primed for perennial (re)discovery.

Horse Lords

— only Baltimore show of 2026!

with Crying Laughing & Duncan Moore

Horse Lords were founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 2010; they evolved from the experimental collective Teeth Mountain and began as a trio with drummer Sam Haberman, guitarist Owen Gardner, and bassist Max Eilbacher, soon adding alto saxophonist Andrew Bernstein to the core ensemble. Though Horse Lords grew out of the fertile Baltimore noise and leftfield rock scene, a storied environment for artists and weirdos that has nurtured many an influential outsider band (Lungfish, Matmos), their approach is more omnivorous than the stippled rhythms of instrumental electric rock would indicate. 

Across sixteen years of frequent touring, Horse Lords have released ten studio, live, and collaboration albums in addition to a split EP with fellow Baltimoreans Lower Dens, a handful of singles and compilation tracks. For RVNG’s FRKWYS series, the band collaborated with Berlin-based composer Arnold Dreyblatt, a onetime student of La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros whose just intonation chamber music was a crucial part of the post-Fluxus Downtown New York City environment.With the relocation of three of the four members to Germany beginning in 2021, the potential for more further creative exploration, and performance opportunities including the Moers Festival (with an 11-piece lineup, interpreting Julius Eastman’s music as well as their own), the interdisciplinary phases of the band’s music was poised for fascinating new directions. The band observes “We are always trying to balance working within the limitations of the quartet and pushing beyond them.

For their second studio album on RVNG Intl., Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive!, Horse Lords have followed this notion and augmented the instrumentation, expanding the format slightly to include bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone (TAK Ensemble), trombonist Weston Olencki (Nate Wooley, RAGE Thormbones) and vocalists Nina Guo (Departure Duo) and Evelyn Saylor (Holly Herndon, Caterina Barbieri) across a program of twelve original compositions. 

Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive! is a reference to a line in a poem by Russian Futurist writer Vladimir Myakovsky, and the band have also name-checked the Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers (wife of painter Josef Albers), Islamic geometrical patterning, Dutch avant-garde group the Maciunas Ensemble (themselves named after Fluxus artist and typographer George Maciunas), composer/writers Tom Johnson, Henry Flynt and Catherine Christer Hennix, and musically draw from sources as diverse as Roscoe Holcolmb, James Brown, Kuwaiti/Bahraini sawt, and electronic composers Maryanne Amacher and Jaap Vink. 

As the members are keen to point out, Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive! is “a bid for the flattening of time and perception in favor of greater goods [and] the iterative nature of reaching/building a paradise in this life, not the next,” and the new album at hand is an illuminating starting point for eternal nowness.

Sweet Pill

with guests, TBA

Doors at 7pm, all ages

Sweet Pill has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket sold goes to Calling All Crows and their work mobilizing music fans and artists to fuel feminist movements. In addition to this partnership, Calling All Crows will also be providing the band with Mental Wellness Allyship Training focused on recognizing and responding to challenges on the road, helping equip them with tools and shared protocols to better support one another throughout the tour.

Sweet Pill’s sophomore album, Still There’s a Glow, is a hard-fought document of self-reflection and growth. It is raw and real, stacked with a lyrical honesty that’s matched by singer Zayna Youssef’s soaring, expressive vocals. Written and recorded in the wake of a whirlwind three years following their 2022 debut LP, Where the Heart Is–and after scrapping essentially an entire album’s worth of demos–Still There’s a Glow is a dynamic, cathartic journey of making conscious change within oneself.

“I went through some depression last spring, and then I went into therapy. It was also a big turning point in my life as I was about to turn 30, while I’d written our first record when I was graduating from college–that’s a big change,” Youssef explains. “I could’ve kept making bad choices because they’re easy, but I had to come clean to myself. Half the album was written before and the other half after, so the songs are kind of hard on myself but some are also hopeful, with a light at the end of the tunnel. You put out a fire, there’s still an ember that’s still glowing–that’s the record. It’s about being at a low and climbing out of it.”

The close-knit New Jersey/Philadelphia quintet had been going virtually nonstop since the release of Where the Heart Is (Topshelf). They went on tour with bands including La Dispute and The Wonder Years, embarked on their own headlining runs–organically growing a devoted fanbase with their passionate live show, which Stereogum has lauded as “an immensely charming powerhouse…songs that obliterate the distinctions between power and finesse, between pop and hardcore, between emo and the larger continuum of crowd-pleasing rock ‘n’ roll.” The young band earned co-signs from stars like Hayley Williams and Doja Cat, while continuing to tour nonstop worldwide and play festivals like Best Friends Forever, Riot Fest, and Outbreak.

Still There’s a Glow captures a time marked by change and progression. “A lot of the album is about the hurdle of being kind to yourself, making good choices for yourself,” Youssef says. “This was our first time writing as a band and to an audience, and it’s so honest and vulnerable. I hope it makes people feel like they can be honest with themselves in the same way.”