SFGothic.net
Contact:
  • Home
  • Gothic Events
    • Calendar
    • Clubs >
      • Clubs by Weeknight
    • Reoccurring Events
    • One-Time Events
  • Gothic Media
    • Music
    • Film
    • Literature
    • Art
    • Games
  • Gothic Services by Mr. M.
  • The Blog
  • Links
  • Contact Us
    • Privacy Policy

Steamstock 2!!!

7/28/2013

0 Comments

 
"You had plenty money, 1922.
You let other women make a fool of you.
Why don't you do right, like some other men do?
Get out of here and get me some money, too."

-- Peggy Lee, "Why Don't You Do Right?"


So, I just got back from the second day of this year's Steamstock.

Unlike last year, it was in July (rather than October) and lasted for two days (instead of just one). Here are my thoughts:

The performances were amazing!!! Considering that they're the primary draw of Steamstock, and were recruited from all over the U.S. -- nay, the WORLD!! -- this makes sense.

Lee Presson and the Nails were astounding (as usual, but it deserves to be repeated) -- if the combination of the terms "goth" and "swing" sound at all appealing to you, LPN is who you want to be listening/dancing to. Hell, even if your interest is just "swing", you'll do alright with them.

Victoria and the Vaudevillains were ALSO excellent. I missed most of their performance last year and somehow kept missing their shows elsewhere since then. Basically, I had to settle for Youtube vids to get a feel for their music, which only made me more sad about missing them over and over. Thankfully (and finally!) I got to see Victoria Victrola live with her cast of Villains and Zombies. And they did not disappoint in the least! Somewhere between adorable, creepy, and crazy, Victoria V and her crew put together a mean zombie cabaret act.

Other delights that particularly piqued my interest over the weekend:

Good Company - I believe Good Company performed last year, as well. But as I've gotten a little bit of a taste for Electro Swing and Boomswing, I was in a much better position to admire them as the only Electro Swing band currently in existence in the U.S. Very danceable, giving a modern twist on the musical stylings of the '30s and '40s.

Hannah Thiem - If you like our own local cellist-delight Unwoman, then you should definitely consider listening to some of Hannah's violin-electro music. Definitely in a similar vein to our own Bay Area darling.

Psyche Corp - This one is particularly hard to peg. Think Alice in Wonderland meets Mirrormask (especially the circus elements) and you might get some vague idea. Her music was dystopian and surreal, but also playful. My particular favorite was her rendition of Poe's "Annabel Lee". The young woman that is Psyche Corp definitely deserves to have a full band backing her. In fact, that she didn't was perhaps my only real complaint about her.

Mr. B., the Gentleman Rhymer - The "headlining act" of the first night, Mr. B was equal parts ridiculous and ridiculously entertaining. His style is "Chap-Hop", which is basically rap, but using overly-proper and exceptionally-polite Oxford English, backed with proverbial "fat beats", all while strumming along on a Banjolele. Amusing both for his own pieces and his renditions of hip-hop classics (slightly skewed to fit with his own styling).

About Steamstock in general:

This year there was definitely more music (two days' worth!!) and probably around 50% more vendors (which was nice when you wanted a break from all the performances).

I definitely liked the "two stage" arrangement again. It allowed the next performers to set up while the current set were on the other stage across the room. There were a few "sound check" faux pas, of course... but MOST of the bands were good and kind enough to adapt quickly to the arrangement and still put on wonderful performances.

There was lots of seating and table-space on the first day, which was nice when you've been standing for an hour after listening to two acts in a row. In fact, I'm not really sure why they took so much of it away on the second day... It made standing around a bit of a problem for those of us who had tired feet (especially those of us that had already done the standing "thing" for a whole day already). 

But the only real issue I had was putting the headlining acts for each day at the end of a very LONG day of music. For instance, I know a number of people that really wanted to see Mr. B on the first day, but they were so tired that, by the time his performance started at ten minutes to eleven, they had already left. And I recall this being something of a problem last year, as well. Abney Park was the headliner that evening, and a number of people had just gotten entirely too exhausted to stay late enough to see them perform, leaving AP with a much smaller audience than the day's ticket sales suggested.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how fixable this issue really is.

So, there you have it, my darklings! Steamstock II was, by and large, as awesome as the first go round. I expect that Steamstock III will be comparable next year, and I look forward to seeing you all there!

-- Mr. M.
0 Comments

Overwhelming October!!

11/1/2012

0 Comments

 
"Boys and girls of every age,
would you like to see something strange?
Come with us and you will see
this, our town of Halloween!"

-- Danny Elfman, "This is Halloween
"

October was excellent. So much to do! Only one month to do it all in!

I should have written something sooner, of course. But STUFF!!!!

So, here's my thoughts on some of the highlights:

PEERS Steampunktoberfest Ball:

This was delightful. Everyone was dressed excellently (including, if the ladies are to be believed, yours truly). Bangers&Mash provided amazingly good music (as they usually do). The drinks and snacks were fabulous (seriously, the people who were constantly bringing out more and more tasty vittles deserve to be lauded!).

And the waltzing was exquisite! I even got to try out a few "scripted" dances with some friends. All-in-all, a truly wonderful evening!

Being in San Mateo, it was a little further away from home than is ideal for me, though Oakland and SF folks shouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with that.
Picture
STEAMSTOCK:

Steamstock was, to put it bluntly, fucking amazing.

<== And, seriously, look how awesome I looked!!!

The vendors were really neat and the music was pretty damn epic across the board.

They really packed the musical acts in, but Brian Gardner and the SwingGoth folks had the ingenious idea of having two stages, so that the crowd could run to one stage to watch a performance while the next band was setting up and sound-checking on the other stage.

Abney Park and Thomas Dolby were quite excellent (as was to be expected), and I enjoyed being able to see Vernian Process live. But for me, the highlight was in getting to hear some really excellent acts I hadn't before.

Lee Presson & the Nails were the biggest newly-discovered treat for me. Seriously, a goth swing band? FUCK YES! And Lee was just... excellent. Super high energy, amazing voice, and he looked really god-damned dapper in that all-black zoot suit with his slicked-back hair and pencil-moustache. Now I really wish I knew how to swing dance!

Other delightful discoveries included Hydrogen Skyline and Victoria & the Vaudevillains (Victoria Victrola is fucking adorable, by the by); though, to be fair, all the acts were fun to hear and watch.

Good news is: they're already planning the Steamstock for next year! Personally, I hope they can use the same venue. The Craneway Pavilion was a really cool place; lots of room with an excellent view of San Francisco from the water.

My only complaint (I've always got at least one) -- I wish more of the vendors had more stuff. A lot of the stalls seemed really sparse on what they were offering. Even though what most of them were offering was pretty cool, there just didn't seem to be much of it. The exception was the Holzer & Combe Haberdashery stall -- they were positively bursting with crazy-awesome stuff to buy. You should seriously visit their website.

And a little more seating and maybe an extra food truck would have been nice.

Club Elysium:

I managed to make it out to the opening of the Club Elysium goth night at the new Purgatory Club in Sacramento (on the arm of a very, very lovely lady, I might add).

While the opening night suffered a few hiccups (like the top floor not being open yet and there not being enough bar staff on hand for the crowd), Club Elysium was quite a hit.

The venue is actually kind of swanky. Purgatory is clearly still in some kind of state of renovation, unfortunately, but the underground "Hell" floor was in excellent repair and was packed to the gills with gothling folks. Lots of nice booth seating with tables all around the perimeter. Clean bathrooms. A huge dance cage AND a stripper pole. All on just the bottom floor... I'm actually a little excited as to what the top floor will be bringing to the table when it opens up.

And the music was pretty damn awesome. It's the first time I've had the pleasure of listening to DJs Blixx and Keyz spin, and, I must say, I was impressed.

I do wish that there had been a little more "swirly goth" though, since the single floor issue crimped the whole "two floors - one for stompy/one for swirly" plan. More for others than for me, of course, since I'm a stomp-monkey. But a few breathers wouldn't have gone awry.

Good news is that it seems that Elysium blew the venue owners away as much as it did the Sac-Goth crowd. With only the one floor, the place quickly reached capacity by about 11 p.m. and the venue owners did manage to call in some back-up on the bar.

For those that don't know the background, Club Elysium is a goth night constructed by members of the Sacramento goth scene specifically to fill the wants and desires of their local scene as a whole. And while it's certain that they won't please everyone, they're definitely approaching the whole thing with arms (if not always eyes) wide open and really trying to meet as much of the community half-way as they can. There's an energy, a drive and passion, that really fuels this thing. Hell, they even had folks walking around with clipboards, taking notes on what people liked and didn't and jotting down suggestions their fellow darklings had.

My final summation is that Elysium is off to a really grand start. The only thing I see holding them back now is the venue itself getting fully up-and-running (in other words: more bar staff, opening the top floor, cleaning up some of the place's "rough edges", and making sure the bouncers stop letting people jump past the line ahead of people that have been waiting twenty minutes to get in). I can't see the future, but Elysium certainly felt like a solid heir to the Sunday-night scene in Sacramento.

Other stuff:

There were other things I made it out to, but I don't really have the energy to go into all of it now.

And a lot that I wished I could have made it out to but didn't: like Ariellah's ShadowDance and DNA's Halloween Bash... Lack of cash and an overabundance of depression leads to all sorts of stupid missing-stuff-I-like.

Upcoming Stuff:

Don't forget, my darklings --

Friday:
  • Strangelove's Dia de los Muertos in San Francisco

Saturday:
  • Le Bal des Vampires in Alameda
  • Subkulture's DeathWake in San Francisco

Sunday:
  • Club Elysium in Sacramento
  • Komor Kommando at the DNA in San Francisco

Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Goth,

-- Mr. M.



0 Comments

Black Beard's Ball and Abney Park

5/15/2011

0 Comments

 
So, this is much later than I intended for this post to get written and go up. I know - I shouldn't let silly things like life get in the way of my virtual endeavors.

Priorities, man!!

So... Black Beard's Ball.

Overall Analysis: All-round, I had a fairly good time. Band was good. Drinks were decent. Venue was kind of cool.

Venue: The Oakland Metro Operahouse.

Kind of a cool place. Basically a warehouse just a few blocks off the Broadway strip in Oakland. There are two bars (one in the main room and one in a room all to itself) and drinks weren't terribly expensive (about $4 for mixers and scotch) though the selection left a bit to be desired. The main room is basically a big black-box theater.

The Crowd: Meh. There were some solid goth folk among them. And a lot of steampunks and a smattering of pirates, of course. And a lot of non-scene folk, too. Anyplace else, I'd call them tourists, but I suspect that their presence may have something to do with Abney Park's fairly wide fan-base itself.

It was also a little thick with people. There wasn't a whole lot of room for dancing and most of that was taken up by the fairly frantic swing-gothers.

Ultimately, though, they certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves and were polite enough when they inevitably bumped into you.

Vendor Room: The entry room was mostly for socializing and a couple of (rather over-priced) vendors. I wasn't terribly impressed by the selection and, though I expected vendoring with the steampunk theme, I was sort of disappointed in the lack of actual steampunk stuff they were selling. The whole selection was a couple artists and a clothing seller that seemed to specialize mostly in extremely expensive (though admittedly nice-looking) gothic, punk, and steampunk-ish belts.

The Mid-Show Variety Performance: In between sets by Abney Park, there were a couple of variety-show mini-performances.

The fire-juggler/breather and an extremely skilled hula-hoop dancer were both fairly awesome

But the set that stood out to me was The Standfire Collective - Two extremely lovely belly-dancers (Lisa Hyde and Unsinkable Molly), dancing to mixed goth-pop and techno-swing. Now, I've had the misfortune to see a lot of really bad bellydancing over the years (seriously, between being a pagan and an ex-Renaissance-Faire monkey, we're talking A LOT). These ladies, though, were not among that ill-favored crowd. Their movements were synchronized, elegant, and their hips moved without their upper torsos being shimmied to distract from bad footwork.

In other words, they danced like professionals.

Also... let's be honest: they were both really hot.

The Unsinkable Molly, later joined Abney Park on stage for parts of their second act.

If you get a chance to see the Standfire Collective, or either of the two lovely ladies that make it up,

The Headline Performance: Abney Park

Never having heard the band before, myself, I wasn't sure what to expect. But I was pleasantly surprised at what I heard.

Imagine old 19th Century sea-shanties of loss, public drunkenness, adventure, and life on the ocean (or, in this case, the sky), with a slightly industrial beat, synth instead of pipe-organs (though the latter might be more apropos), and just a faint touch of what I'd call Tom Waits-ishness (a lot of their songs remind me of the slightly surreal themes of pieces like "Singapore" and "Cemetery Polka" from the Rain Dogs album)... And you probably still can't exactly imagine what I'm describing.

Their music, whether properly called steampunk or not (for they are neither steam nor all that punk), is charmingly idiosyncratic and defiant of classification. And this is not a bad thing.

Using a variety of instruments (synthesizer and guitars, of course, but also accordion, mandolin, violin, hand-drums, and, hell, even a banjo), they manage to come off feeling a little like folk music but with a lot of metal and industrial sensibilities. Actually... come to think of it, a lot like Jethro Tull's combination of folk and hard rock in Crest of a Knave.

But their sound isn't the only part of their charm. Oh no! They have the steampunk aesthetic to play with... though, in their case, it feels a lot more like steampunk's version of the cybergoth. Steamer-goth, maybe? Or perhaps more accurately, Babbage-goth?

I'm getting a sense of a lot of cross-genre bending-blending-and-pollination in every aspect of who they are.

All that said - I bought their two latest albumsÆther Shanties and The End of Days after the show and have played the ever-loving shit out of them in the days since.

I think we can count that as an endorsement on my behalf.
0 Comments

Looks Like I'm rolling Steampunk tomorrow. What about you?

5/6/2011

0 Comments

 
For those of you not yet in the know, Abney Park, former goth-band turned steampunk (yeah, that's right, you heard me correctly: steampunk) will be playing tomorrow night (Saturday, May 7th) at Black Beard's Ball which is happening at the Oakland Metro Opera House.

Brought to us by the lovely people at Swing Goth!

I hope to see some of my little darklings there.

I'll be the one with the goggles.

-- Mr. M.
0 Comments

    Author

    MisterMephisto is a pretentious prick. That's why his opinions are so much better than yours.

    (With the exception of the images, everything on these pages, including the identities/names “SFGothic”, “SFGothic.net”, and “Mister Mephisto”, is © 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014. Images belong to their original creators and/or owners.)

    Archives

    April 2014
    August 2013
    July 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    January 2013
    November 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    May 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011

    Categories

    All
    Abney Park
    Aesthetic Perfection
    Album Review
    Anti/Life
    Archpedant
    Asylum
    Ayria
    Ballroom
    Bloody Crumpets
    Club Nocturne
    Clubs
    Combichrist
    Concerts
    Dark Shadows
    Dating
    Death Guild
    Die Maschinen
    Dismantled
    Emilie Autumn
    Events
    Everything Goes Cold
    Fashion
    Front Line Assembly
    God Module
    Gothic Media
    Imperative Reaction
    Kmfdm
    New Wave City
    Pagan
    Peers
    Pics
    Polyamory
    Rammstein
    Reverence
    Rpg Review
    Shadowdance
    Solace
    Standfire Collective
    Steampunk
    Strangelove
    Swing Goth
    System Syn
    The Cell
    Unwoman
    Vespertine Circus
    Webmastery
    Witching Hour
    Wumpskate Sf

    RSS Feed

    Increase your website traffic with Attracta.com
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.