When Evan Taylor tells people that he is a Studio Art and a Biology major at Gustavus Adolphus, the response is usually along the lines of: What’re you gonna do? Illustrate textbooks?
In early February he demonstrated a place where art and science collide when he sent a weather balloon outfitted with a Styrofoam cooler holding a video camera and a GPS system about 125,000 feet into the air to capture footage.
For comparison sake, this is about three times as high as an airplane flies — and incidentally required conversations with the FAA. He is not the only person to have done this experiment.
“I watched $800 fly into the air,” said Taylor, who is from the Mankato area and worked here at the Great Lakes Aquarium this past summer. “Once it went into thin air I just thought ‘Oh crap. It’s gone.’”
The GPS was programmed to send back location information every 10 minutes, but Taylor lost contact with the balloon for about three hours. He and a friend headed toward Faribault, and when they finally reconnected with with the navigation system they found they were less than 10 miles from where the gear landed in the snow, making just a 6-inch divot.
He was able to watch the footage on his laptop as they traveled back to Mankato. The video from the less than 3-hour space tour (above) includes the ascent, the weather balloon bursting, and the fall back to earth — slowed by a parachute.This is compressed into a video that lasts just more than 2 minutes and is set to music.
He says on his Vimeo site: “The idea sparked when I climbed to the highest point of Oahu, Hawaii to take photographs, and realized that I wanted to go higher…into Space.”
Taylor doesn’t have big plans to top this feat.
“I told all of my friends, I need help getting my bucket list together,” he said. “Not that I’d be trying to top that. For me, I think so many people have nothing but good ideas. Just go do it.”
Consider a YouTube video where Beyonce’s song and video for “Single Ladies” is slowed down 800 percent, to the point where it sounds like the kind of spacey messages Carol Anne Freeling delivered from inside the television in the 1980′s flick “Poltregeist.”
Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” becomes a sort of Gregorian chant near an ocean.
Musician Zac Bentz decided to test out Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch, a program with a pretty self-explanatory name, on some of the electro/glitch music he makes under the name Dirty Knobs.
“It’s like this simple, tiny little program you can put audio into and it will stretch it out ridiculously long, like 13 days,” Bentz said. “They were using it on a Justin Bieber song. It would be this crazy epic, operatic, ambient thing.”
After messing around with the program, he went on to make an 8-hour album of drone/doom music that is getting some iLove from fans of the genre. Bentz said it has been streamed 5,000 times and downloaded more than 200 times — and it is an ambitious download, weighing in at more than 1 gig. His suggested donation is $1, but he’s found some people want to pay more.
He got some help from comic-creator, author, and otherwise in-the-knower of things Warren Ellis, who posted a link to the Bentz album “Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell.” Bentz had sent him a link, knowing Ellis was into drone music. According to Ellis’s superpopular blog, it was shared on Facebook 62 times, StumbleUpon more than 200 times, and retweeted more than 150 times. He said of the work-shift long album, which is cut into 13 pieces:
This album is eight hours long. That’s right. An eight-hour piece of ambient drone music broken into thirteen chapters. The album’s name, FIELD RECORDINGS FROM THE EDGE OF HELL, is such a perfectly fitting descriptor of the sound that I have little more to add. I’m only 90 minutes in and I swear I can hear organs playing from inside a pit.
The album is a mix of re-purposed old stuff and new music Bentz made specifically with the stretching program in mind.
“It spiraled out of control,” Bentz said. “I ended up filling up my hard drive with stuff. I started editing it down and figuring out what worked.”
Even Bentz hasn’t gone straight through from the 28 plus minute “Falling Upon the Darkened Shore” to the album’s almost 53-minute long finale “A Lament Crosses the Horizon.” But he’s listened to chunks of it at a time and has found it good music to write to.
“It’s a good thing to shut out the world,” Bentz said. “If you turn off one of the songs halfway through, it’s too silent. Like the air conditioning just went off in the building. It has this weird effect of lulling you into a trance. It’s this constant presence.”
Enough talky talky: You can stream and/or buy the album here.
And since we’re here anyway, Bentz and his non-drone band The Surfactants play something totally different than this on Saturday at The Rex, 600 E. Superior St. Also on the bill: Cars & Trucks and American Rebels.
The good news is you have the opportunity to see a genre-bending Austin-based band Asylum Street Spankers and potentially become part of their legion of followers.
The bad news is: If you like them you’re out of luck. The sometimes old-timey, sometimes novelty, sometimes agnostic gospel band is playing its first show in Duluth — a stop on its farewell tour called “Spanks for Everything.â€
“People still get turned on to the band every day,†said the singing, saw-playing, uke-minding Christina Marrs, who has been with the band from the beginning. “Maybe we’ll be one of those bands that get more popular when they break up.â€
Check out my story on Asylum Street Spankers in Thursday’s News Tribune.
Here is Christina Marrs on:
WHETHER THE BAND HAS ACCOMPLISHED WHAT IT WANTED TO
CM: It was formed for people who had … it was just a way to get together and play music and have fun and not have rules imposed. In that spirit, we’ve certainly maintained that. Nothing has been off-limits for this band. That’s certainly been true throughout the history of the band.
HOW TO GET 17 YEARS WORTH OF MATERIAL INTO A FINAL SHOW
CM: We’re doing songs that we’ve been doing for a long time, songs that haven’t been recorded and everything in between. It’s hard to bring it down to 24 songs. I think the really important thing is that we’re happy with the material we’re playing. If we’re sick of a song, we’re likely to retire it.
WHAT FELT LIKE THE APEX OF THE BAND’S CAREER
CM: Our 10th anniversary show was kind of like that. We did two shows here in Austin. We were able to bring back 21-22 current and former members of the band on stage. We had people who hadn’t been in the band in years playing with brand new members. That was really cool. The 10 year marker felt like a real accomplishment.
THE LONGEVITY OF THE BAND AND WHETHER IT IS POSSIBLE TO LAST 17 YEARS ANYMORE
CM: There are (bands that have lasted 17 years) but you haven’t heard of most of them. It’s bands that have been road dogs and had a small but devoted following. … There is something to be said for a grass roots organization. We never signed with a major label, so we were never indebted to a major label.
FANS THAT HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR 17 YEARS
CM: The core group has been following us for a number of years. It’s interesting to see people who were in college and now they have families … Our Facebook stats tell us that our average fan is 39.
HOW THE INTERNET CHANGED THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
CM: Without the internet and videos going viral and file sharing, there are lots of people who never would have heard of us. There is this industry-wide trend of people not listening to music the same way. I want people to hear the music and get turned on to it. On the other hand, people don’t realize how much it hurts bands like us. For a band like us, our bread and butter is CD sales. … It’s a mixed blessing: More people know about you; the more people know about you, the more CD sales drop.
HOW ASYLUM STREET SPANKERS WILL BE REMEMBERED
CM: I would hope that we’d be remembered for the musicality and the skillfullness of our musicians, more than we would be remembered for the videos that went viral or the lowest common denominator novelty songs that were played over and over again on the radio. This band has so many other levels to it. I think of Randy Newman and his song “Short People” that he got so much flack for and is probably best remembered for. I think he’s an amazing songwriter. People tend to grasp the shortest straw. I hope we wouldn’t be like that.
[Note: Bearing that last comment in mind, it seems a little obnoxious that I'm going to post their most-viral of viral videos. But it's good! It's funny! And once again, it is for adult-aged people].
Asylum Street Spankers play at 8 p.m. Monday at Teatro Zuccone, 222 E. Superior St. Tickets are $10.
Looks like Trent Waterman of NorthShore Sessions was at it again, capturing most of the Doomtree crew, probably somewhere near Clyde Iron Works where they performed Jan. 29.
Now that was a fun show. Under-attended, if I dare say. I think about 300 people in that space feels like all the high school mixer with none of the “November Rain.” But it also lends to a bit of a VIP feel. If, for instance, Sims and Mike Mictlan came down to floor level to let fans get close enough to touch their hair. Or. Hats. And a small circle of bodies in motion surround them … well, that’s just rad.
So … old news, yes. But the show was awesome. Lots of zigging and zagging and stage antics and Dessa singing: “I’m not a writer, I just drink a lot about it.” And the video by the guy behind NorthShore Sessions is another in a line of alternative takes on Minnesota musicians. I’m not planning on posting a link every single time Waterman picks up his camera, but the whole thing reminded me that I’d never gone on record as saying: Doomtree show. Good.
Here’s some background on Waterman from a story I wrote in mid-December.
It wasn’t hard to convince Minneapolis musician Jeremy Messersmith to stroll along a mall alcove and strum his guitar and sing.
All Trent Waterman did was ask the singer-songwriter. And after Messersmith’s show at Beaner’s Central that October night, they shot the impromptu video for “Beautiful Children” in two takes, including a break for Waterman to change the camera’s battery.
The end result was video No. 2 in Waterman’s growing collection of North Shore Sessions, a hobby that pairs the budding filmographer with musicians for quick-hit videos in unlikely settings such as a former railroad tunnel, a friend’s apartment or a barn in Wrenshall. He claims as inspiration Vincent Moon’s “The Take-Away Shows,” in which musicians are recorded playing in the streets and parks, highlighting the quirks, ticks and spontaneity.
“I’ve always kind of been interested in different acoustics and how it affects the way sound travels – spaces that sound interesting and look cool, too,” said Waterman, a senior at the University of Minnesota Duluth studying graphic design and photography.
John Ziegler reviewed the new Jamestown Story album “Find a Way” in today’s DNT and said this: “(It is) … a little pop masterpiece that lyrically centers on hoping for second chances as well as the importance that faith plays in one’s life. It’s full of graceful melodies, attractive instrumental touches and knockout arrangements that support the songs’ intent without overpowering the vocals.”
Dane Schmidt, a full-time Minneapolis-based musician who frequently arranges gigantic concerts starring young musicians at Grandma’s Sports Garden, listed 5 Things to Know about the new Jamestown Story album.
1. This is the first full length we’ve put out in over two years.
2. About 70% of it was recorded in Tokyo, Japan.
3. “Every Moment” was actually written by Dane’s brother Jordan.
4. The CD contains half acoustic songs and half full-band songs.
5. This is my personal favorite of all the Jamestown Story cd’s.
Meanwhile, Jamestown Story is playing a CD release show at 7 p.m. Saturday at Beaner’s Central, 324 N. Central Ave.
So Ed Asner is going to be performing Feb. 24 at the Reif Center in Grand Rapids, which is super interesting in that Your Facebook-friends-love-Betty-White kind of way. It’s a reschedule for an event that was supposed to happen in January, but it was a busy month: He had surgery, he smack-talked his former MTM co-star Cloris Leachman.
Here’s a wondrous Ed Asner moment from when he was on “Chelsea Lately” in April. He grabbed at Chelsea Handler’s keister and lamented her lack of junk in the trunk. (See clip below, which — if I know Chels, probably isn’t U-18 friendly):
Anyway, here’s the word on the show from the Reif Center:
Asner’s solo production of FDR, a powerful retrospective on the iconic president, was originally scheduled for January 11th. Unfortunately, the star performer went in for hip surgery in late December. His agents would not make any promises on reschedule dates, as they wanted to monitor his recovery first. However, Asner is now doing well. He is sharp as ever and ready to get back on the road.
About this site
My name is Christa Lawler and I'm the Arts & Entertainment reporter for the Duluth News Tribune. In this here space you will find a hodge podge of nonsense, including overflow from interviews with rock stars, reviews, and links to things you should read/watch/hear.
