Unless someone else takes over the organizing, the Stoner Hands of Doom festival is in its fifth and final year. An annual festival of all bands rock/metal/doom/sludge and loud as hell, it’s time to pack up the bong one final time (yeah, right), and head down to Berbati’s for some head-banging and tinnitus. SHOD’s last […]
Julianne Shepherd
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The Art of Noize
Abstract Bands Get Extreme, Tropical
Last year’s Tropix festival ended in chaos, with a hailstorm of fireworks, smoke, flashing lights, and eardrum-breaking screeches. It was enthralling. It was apocalyptic. It was Denver band Friends Forever, who play loud, noisy rock music from inside their van, enhanced by theatrics and, sometimes, giant props floating in the air. That maniacal finale summed […]
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Realize You’re the Catalyst
A Conversation with Medea Benjamin
Medea Benjamin is seemingly tireless, as both a leader in the anti-war movement and as a human rights activist. Among countless years of work and action in the US and abroad, she co-founded the 15-year-old international human rights organization Global Exchange–which promotes global, civil, political, social, and economic rights and fair trade. In 2000, she […]
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All About Jessica Peters
Petracovich Carries Us Into the Ether
Petracovich Wed Aug 20 Holocene One of my favorite movies, a contemporary Japanese film called All About Lily Chou-Chou, hinges its plot around the concept of “Ether.” In the film, “Ether” is meant to describe a boundary-free space, like the internet–and more specifically, a heavenly, figurative place, where the music of Lily Chou-Chou transports the […]
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Meltdown Music
Party of One: Le Freak So Chic
Party of One Thurs Aug 7 Blackbird Some songwriting dudes spend entire lifetimes attempting to convey their isolation and loneliness. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Party of One, a good way to do it is to wax polemic on history’s great disasters; for instance, THE HOLOCAUST. Not stoked on understatement, Party of […]
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Punk in the Family
PDX Sister Band’s First Spicy Hits
Black Peppercorns Fri Aug 1 Stumptown Downtown The cover art of Black Peppercorns’ First Spicy Hits warns “contents heavier than they may appear.” The band, comprised of two nine-year-old sisters, plays a few screamy garage numbers (in near-perfect rhythm) that rumble and roll with primal attitude. But any gnarled edges are sweetened by a sometimes-breathy […]
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Steal This Song
Thinking about Filesharing? The RIAA Will Track You Down and Shoot Your Computer
It was a move that warmed the heart. Almost. On June 25, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that, for the time being, it would cease pursuing lawsuits against filesharing websites like KaZaA, Grokster and Aimster–sites designed for users to download and “share” entire albums at no cost. However, the lobby organization then […]
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No Wave Not No Wave
Critic’s Language and Erase Errata
Erase Errata Mon July 14 Disjecta When I first interviewed Erase Errata for the Mercury, I declared the “no wave revival freak-out” (to quote myself, sorry) both alive and dead, predicting we’d get sick of said revival in about 23 minutes. Of course, two years later, the term “no wave” is as common in music […]
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Power to the Peeps! Snaps!!!
Reese Witherspoon Saves America
Legally Blonde 2 dir. Herman-Wurmfield Now Playing Various Theaters More than any other actress, 27-year-old Southerner Reese Witherspoon embodies American ideals at their most idealistic, representing the beauty, altruistic savvy, and awesomely fine-tuned dental hygiene we so admire in our finest citizens. Reese is the vision of the morally upstanding–the perfect collision of Jackie Kennedy […]
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Push It
Disco D’s Nasty Ghettotech Joints
Disco D Sat July 5 Ohm “If you ain’t suckin’ this dick, I don’t need you, bitch,” raps Helluva, on Disco D’s remix of “Keys to the Whip.” “You want the keys to the whip? Then stop teasin’ this dick. These hoes runnin’ they mouth, shakin’ they ass in the thong, I wanna come in […]
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July 4, 1996
Bill Clinton was in office, and the drugs fluttered from the sky like candy from a piñata. Dropping three doses of sugarcube blotter acid, drinking a pint of Jim Beam, and smoking a joint all at once seemed like a good idea then, in the only era approximating free love my generation ever got. It […]
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Death & Dismemberment
May: File Under “Goth Classics”
May dir. McKee Opens Fri June 27 Lloyd Center Since their heyday in the mid-’80s, great horror flicks have been a dying genre, collapsing under the empty-calorie weight of reality-, meta- and supernatural-variety winky slasher films. Luckily, someone out there sought to combat this unfortunate turn: Lucky McKee, the writer/director of a wonderful black comedy […]