THE MICROPHONES / MT EERIE + Casiotone For The Painfully Alone + Woelv

Tue 23rd May 2006

Upset The Rhythm presents
THE MICROPHONES
+ MT EERIE
+ Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
+ Woelv

Doors 8.00
£6 via WeGotTickets

Born in Anacortes, Washington, under the shadow of Mount Eerie, in 1978, Phil Elvrum began creating at high school, discovering that making tapes and loud noise and exploring the creepiness of ones hometown in songs and books and pictures could be an alternative to doing any other "work". After moving to Olympia in 1997 and spending days heading to K Records or Dub Narcotic just like any other day job, Phil Elvrum has emerged as one of the truest artists or troubadours at work today. His existence is one consumed wholly by creation, of travelling to sing and dance in front of people. After four albums as The Microphones, a winter spent in Norway having toured and "died", resulted in the desire to create a different person, band, artist, whatever - one to explore ideas of dark mountains, cold songs, a grandmother's face and so on. And thus the legend of Mt. Eerie was born.
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone is the musical alias of 28 year old American film school drop-out Owen Ashworth. Owen began making music in 1997, after he realized that song-making was a far more cost-effective means of storytelling than film-making. The first three CFTPA albums, released through Tomlab, were made using only battery operated keyboards and electronics recorded to four-track cassette and defined a hybrid strain of raw, emotional and very homemade synth pop that was instantly recognizable as Ashworth's own - claustrophobic two-minute character studies shuddered with reverbed beats, blown-out chords and Owen's bittersweet lyrics. Believing he had taken his self-imposed set of limitations to their logical conclusion, Owen has expanded his sound for the hot-off-the-press new record 'Etiquette', expanding his once utilitarian aesthetic to a broader production spectrum of instrumentation and collaboration.
Woelv is Geneviève Castrée - a French-speaker from Québec, Canada. As a teenager Geneviève took cues from the likes of SUBHUMANS and CRASS, writing loud songs in basements about obscene things and singing because she couldn't play guitar fast enough. But then she calmed down and opened up, sharing stages with the likes of Calvin Johnson and Julie Doirin and taking much of the same approach toward creation as her friend, collaborator and K Records labelmate Mr Elvrum. Woelv is now about the total aesthetic package, creating records of beautiful songs to complement comic books of beautiful drawings.

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