We Don't Need to Sound Good to Sound Good, You Know?: The Jips »
Profile and photos of The Jips, a local high school rock & roll band, including interview with frontman Boston Fleener.
Profile and photos of The Jips, a local high school rock & roll band, including interview with frontman Boston Fleener.
Champaign, IL (May 11, 2009) – Fans of THQ’s Red Faction franchise no longer need to wait until the June 2nd release date to experience life as a Mars colonist in the upcoming video game Red Faction: Guerrilla—they can simply visit the RFG tour truck when it makes its stop in downtown Champaign on May 18th…
I wanted to review Jane Boxall. I really did.
I trudged to Aroma Café last week with all the best intentions: I would write up the show with Lynn O’Brien that she was playing at the café that night. However, as soon as Boxall took her place behind her instrument of choice — the marimba — and picked up her mallets, I found myself quite unable to describe exactly what was happening. My stilted review (“The noises Jane makes on the big marimba are very nice”) would not have done her justice.
Boxall is a diminutive performer who harnesses the sound of the 500-pound marimba like a lion tamer, and in her spare time, she drums for — of all local groups — aggro-metal band Tritone. (She’s also the former drummer for prog rock ex-outfit Triple Whip.) At Aroma, the longer I watched her intriguing performance, the more I gave up on finding my own words, and the more I wondered what led her to choose the marimba, choose a metal band, choose central Illinois as the stage for her career…
Upon the premiere of last year’s indie film sensation Juno, Kimya Dawson said, “I am excited for when the soundtrack comes out. But […] it’s all really scary for me. Some of those songs were recorded in my bed in Bedford Hills, under the covers, on the 4-track. And when people were coming up to me telling me I did a great job, it felt weird because I didn’t do a job. I wrote a bunch of crap when my heart was hurting.”
Anti-folk pioneer and cult favorite Kimya Dawson was launched into sudden stardom last year with the release of the Juno soundtrack, on which her music was heavily featured. Dawson, who performed as one-half of The Moldy Peaches until 2004, began a solo career when the band went on hiatus, recording a series of heartfelt lo-fi albums, the latest titled Remember That I Love You – a phrase that could also serve as a mantra for Dawson’s music…
In 2005, John Hoeffleur made the following soon-to-be-understatement: “I must confess I personally have a bad feeling about it.” Hoeffleur, the frontman for local group The Beauty Shop, was speaking (on the local music forum OpeningBands) of the WPGU/buzz Local Music Awards, then in its first year. The Beauty Shop took home the award for “Best Roots/Americana Band” that year, but this year, they have turned down a nomination. “In the past the price of my acquiescence has been a couple free drinks,” says Hoeffleur of his current nomination refusal. “This year, my costs have gone up…”
Backstage during a play, there is sometimes a lot of waiting, or something that looks a lot like waiting. Actors wait, reading by dim light, listening to iPods, or knitting quietly, the clicking of needles punctuating the muted sounds of conversation from the stage. The stage manager sits, idly turning pages of a script, occasionally setting off sound cues, while the director paces maniacally, ears perked like a setter, having placed all control of her show into the tenuously held hands of the actors and the audience…
“Suddenly, I was casting rappers and teaching them to act, instead of casting actors and teaching them to rap,” says director Aaron Polk on casting local hip-hop artist Krukid in “The Bomb-itty of Errors,” an award-winning “ad-rap-tation” of the Shakespeare classic The Comedy of Errors. He adds, “I’m certainly more qualified to teach rappers to act.”
Written and originally performed by a group of actors, writers, and emcees, “Bomb-itty” has gone up in several major cities worldwide, and has just recently become available to non-professional theatre troupes for performance. Focusing on the classic comedic Shakespeare themes of mistaken identity, seduction, and infidelity, the show was nominated for Best Lyrics at the Drama Desk Awards, nominated for Outer Critics Circle Awards, and received the Jefferson Award in Chicago and the Grand Jury Prize at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen in 2001…
