*All events are 21+ valid ID required for entry*
*Attendees are encouraged to wear masks while not actively drinking*
8PM – Doors
9PM – Show
FRIENDSHIP (11:00 PM)
Friendship’s Merge debut, Love the Stranger, moves like a country record skipping in just the right spot, leaving its fellow travelers longing for a place they’ve only visited in their dreams. Guitarist Peter Gill, drummer Michael Cormier-O’Leary, bassist Jon Samuels, and hawkeyed balladeer Dan Wriggins map out the group’s particular, breathtaking landscape and invite the listener to share in its glory.
Love the Stranger’s invitation is all the more wondrous because its characters have clearly been hurt before. “I need solitude and I also need you,” Wriggins reckons in “Ugly Little Victory.” Wide awake, vulnerable, and gimmickless, Friendship won’t hesitate to confide in us, or even ask for help when the moment calls, like on the lyrical centerpiece of “Alive Twice”:
Under your eyeball spell, I was losing myself/ Not in the good way you used to talk about/ I remember a day, Cedar Park Cafe/ I was in a bad place and you set me straight/ With your on-the-nose advice
Between instrumental pit stops at “Kum & Go” and “Quickchek,” local references in Love the Stranger create a catalog of human perception, presented as roadside attractions. From grape jelly residue (“Ramekin”) to the site of a demolished cathedral (“St. Bonaventure”) to King of the Hill quotations (“Smooth Pursuit”), the record’s images craft a symbolic language of high and low Americana, both evocative and consistently accessible. Spending time with Love the Stranger creates a community—one in which the window between the listener and the music-maker shatters in full, until all that remains are the fragments you decide to pick up together.
TENCI (10:00 PM)
Tenci began as Jess Shoman’s bedroom-folk project in Chicago in December 2018.
With the help of Spencer Radcliffe and Tina Scarpello it quickly became something more fully-formed. By spring of 2019 they’d recorded their debut My Heart Is An Open Field.
They recorded the album in Radcliffe’s home in just a couple months. Having played in the band, he understood the tenderness it needed to maintain. Half of the songs were written the week before. The album retains that spontaneity and rawness.
FLANAFI (9:00 PM)
Flanafi is the solo project of Simon Martinez, Philadelphia experimental guitar wizard and the melodic half of Boiled Records alumni Pulgas. These songs contain the same burbling junkyard genius of that band, filtered through a very different lens. One could use Flanafi as a required text in the economics of bombast with no reservations. It's Sly Stone drowning in a liquor ocean – it's Dntel style IDM made with washboards and spoons instead of computers – it's Colin Blunstone run through a chipmunk filter in a hell based on planet IKEA. This shit is weird and it's beautiful and it's one of a kind. In an era where regurgitation and veneer hold sway, this young freak is following his oddly sober muse. He's got the muse cornered and it's not clear if he's gonna set it on fire or serenade it. He could do either, really, as Simon's talent is absolutely unparalleled in this new epoch. Rumour has it that each of his fingers is individually sentient. He knows exactly what he's doing. Soak it up.