ATHICA presents music by Vernal Scuzz, Skinless Lambs, and Salmon Tubes
8:00 PM Friday, October 25, 2024
$10 Suggested Donation.  No one turned away for lack of funds.

Vernal Scuzz is a free-form band from Alabama, USA.
Wild mixtures of improvisation, themes, songs and tape experiments played by Jasper Lee, Mika Carpenter, and James Elliott, on bass, zithers, euphonium, electronics, tapes, drums & words. They pursue an evolving sound informed by cut-ups, noise, avant-folk, and punk. Members of the group have played in Silica Gel, Worst Spills, and also collaborated with Johnny Coley, Joel Nelson, Sister Sniffle, Turner Williams Jr., Walker Yancey and others.

Vernal Scuzz emerge like a wet hot electric creature hissing in the night on their first release. Somewhere between proto-punk and primeval ceremony, the music is a highly charged rhythmic vehicle for navigating the murk of media litter. Crackles of noise meld with zither and brass tones….sounds that build an atmosphere and then burst suddenly into song. Jasper and Mika’s voices coo and screech in equal doses. A recurring theme is the transmission of ideas through technological & linguistic means. Lyrics are made from cut-up sources like football game transcripts, tracts, lawnmower manuals, and somehow come out beautifully. Vernal Scuzz’s first recording presents the group’s idiosyncratic concepts through a visceral playing style that is unpredictable and raw.

The Skinless Lambs are a noisecore punk duo that gathers inspiration from a creature they stumbled across the first night they played together.

This performance is a regurgitation of the material the duo has laid down since encountering the skinless lamb, which runs through hardcore, proto-punk, syncopated acoustic string scores and harsh noise. With John Gelder on guitar and Hayden Maltese on bass, they look to illustrate the fear and uncertainty felt from looking into the eyes of the possessed entity that they had never seen before, or since.

Salmon Tubes is an electro-acoustic improvisation duo from Athens, Georgia, made up of Kyle MacKinnel and Jon Vogt. To date, they have collaborated visually and musically as members of Sonic Divination and Brooms of Fantasia. Their separate evolving music endeavours have included frog like leaf, CALL, come, Chairs, Oceanic Sound Research, Solution Cave, and Dark Wale.

Salmon Tubes represents the expression of multiple instruments (salmon) carried electronically through a narrow system of tubes (a heavily processed signal path) used to bridge here to there across massive dams of intelligible thought and understanding, effectively transporting nature through the built environment back upstream and back into dream.