2013-10-25: SpookEasy HallowSwing Cabaret

September has been a blast! The Accordion Noir fest was a winner (isn't it always, though?) -- in promotions it was nice hearing ourselves described as "festival favorites" on the CBC's North by Northwest, and if you like you can find a link to (and, ahem, extensive analysis of) the debut of our interactive choose-your-own-adventure song suite performed over here. (Note: performance recording is not interactive.) Then we played a special dance set for Planks alumnus Venus Soberanes at the local reception for her wedding with Jeremy at the Little Mountain Studio, rounding out a variety show spiked with Al Mader himself! Hopefully we will be manifesting at the Horace Phair party this Columbus Day, but we're getting a bit beyond the scope of this post -- which is about our next public local gig you can enjoy!

You are cordially invited to the Spookeasy HallowSwing Cabaret party on Friday Oct. 25th, a Prohibition era-themed Halloween Party!

It’s time to heed the bell's toll for ghastly, ghoulish and grim Halloween partying with Vancouver's Electro Swing Clubr.

Come in your best retro-horror garb: top hat & tails, flapper, Victorian asylum lunatics, boudoir, silent horror film characters, Carnivale freaks, steampunk, horror circus, Satanic burlesque, Voodoo, Day of the Dead, hospital horror, haunted forest animals, evil clowns, Halloween masks... etc.

In the Cabaret room:
* Every time the Tim Sars Band plays a show, they know it might be their last. While the band is swingin' hot, the lyrics always seem to go to the dark side. The very talented Brendan Krieg on drums and vocals, Roisin Adams on piano and vocals, and Russell Sholberg on bass are complicit in Tim's evil musical plot, and those on the dance floor shall be the victims. During their set we'll have a Hot Beat Swing Dance and Black Bottom Stomp performances.

* Burlesque retro ghost number by Riannaconda

* Sword-swallowing sideshow by Kata Sita, Human BlockHead, Bug eating and more... If this performance doesn't give you goosebumps nothing will!!!

* Haunted Go-Go Flapper Girls

* VooDoo DJs: From Montreal, Speakeasy Electro Swing gang Eliazar Hason. From the Island - AppleCat and local crew Rudy.

* In the Hideaway Room we'll have 3 bands: The Creaking Planks, Meg A Tron and Sound Architecture:

The jug band of the damned, the Creaking Planks, salvage festering songs from the mass grave of popular music, binding their festering choruses together with a thread spun from extinct instruments, making them move once again by perversely introducing the strange spark of life.

* In the Tiki room, we'll have the bad boys SideShow, Doe Ran and DJ Spaz. They're guaranteed to rattle your bones… and reanimate your zombie hearts It won’t mean a thing until the zombies start to swing!

Also expect the visuals to captivate and twist your mind with images from the past and future blended together in one cocktail.

Advance tickets are $15, $20 at the door. Here's the Facebook event announcement.

2013-09-12: 6th annual Accordion Noir Festival launch party

Whoops, never got around to making a post about tonight's show on our own website! We've been very, very busy working on our debut performance piece for tonight.

The show will be great all-around; the out-of-towner performers are simply phenomenal and this chance to see them shouldn't be missed. So, ah, here's the promotional boilerplate from the festival's website.

This year’s Festival kicks off with the Accordéon Café, a presentation of accordion artists who boast equal gifts as storytellers, humourists, and genre-bending instrumentalists.  Featuring casse-croûte by Crêpe Bohème the Café is a chance to slow down, listen close, and be transported by the special intimacy that flows whenever musicians and audiences gather under the influence of each other.

Award-winning Francophone accordion legend Steven Normandin from Montreal makes his hotly anticipated return to Vancouver, following his hit performance at the 2011 MusicFest Vancouver. Fans of Normandin know to expect riveting renditions of traditional chansons from France and Québec, enlivened by touches of jazz and swing and performed with a uniquely theatrical flair. Audiences discovering Normadin for the first time will find themselves in the hands of a true master: an artist who can make you laugh, cry and dance in the space of one set of music. Equally accomplished as an instrumentalist and as a songwriter, Normandin has performed in work by Robert Lepage, appeared as a soloist with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, and toured internationally with a host of musical projects and theatrical productions.
The raw feel of blues and country music meet the sensibilities of a first class storyteller in renegade accordionist David P. Smith. Hailed as one of Victoria’s most captivating and original songwriters, Smith is known for visceral, often hilarious narratives that crack open the boundaries between humor and despair. Appearing with his talented accomplice, violinist Rachelle Reath, David P. Smith’s performance promises to reveal why EXCLAIM! Magazine went so far as to call his accordion music a “siren song.”
The Creaking Planks, East Vancouver's jug band of the damned, are the best at what they do.  (Not coincidentally, they are the /only/ ones who do what they do.) A well-heeled crew of folk music misfits, they bring their instruments together to challenge the ghettoizing expectations of their respective traditional repertoires through détournement, the mash-up, and their specialty, the outright train wreck.  This festival's program sees them boldly charging off into uncharted territory (as usual) with an unprecedented audience-interactive suite of songs inspired by the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure children's book series of the 1980s.

(And a tip 'o the hat to Erin & Abe, whose wedding reception we performed at late on September 7th at The Ticket downtown!)