The Night Beats, Morgan Delt, Holy Wave, Froth
Date/Time: Jun 18 2016, 9:00 pm to 11:59 pm
Vancouver, The Rickshaw TheatreCost: $18.00
Find tickets: here
Austin’s LEVITATION has grown from a small word-of-mouth event to an internationally acclaimed, full weekend event that attracts attendees from all over the world. To bring the festival to Vancouver, The Reverberation Appreciation Society partnered with Timbre Concerts, founding Levitation Vancouver in 2015. Now in it’s second year, the festival returns to Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park, with night shows in select downtown venues.
Levitation Vancouver’s programming maintains the spirit of LEVITATION in Austin, TX, offering a wide range of international and local talent across the musical spectrum, with an emphasis on artists with an experimental and/or psychedelic edge.
Levitation Vancouver works closely with community partners to provide a safe, accessible and environmentally conscious experience for all festival-goers while championing local and independent Vancouver businesses and artists.
The Night Beats are an American Psychedelic, Garage and Soul group based out of Seattle, Washington. The group consists of Lee Blackwell (Lead Guitar, Vocals), James Traeger (Drums) and Tarek Wegner (Bass). Night Beats incorporate sounds of early R&B, Texas Psychedelic Rock, UK Blues, Folk and Soul. Danny Lee “Blackwell” originally from Dallas, Texas founded Night Beats in 2009 when James Traeger moved from Austin, Texas to Seattle, Washington. Named as an homage to Sam Cooke’s Magnum Opus[3] the then 2-piece picked up Tarek Wegner who was living in Seattle. The Night Beats toured extensively early on completing multiple North American tours during 2010 and were signed within weeks of self releasing their debut EP, the H-Bomb EP. Picked up by Chicago’s Trouble in Mind Records (Ty Segall, Fresh and Only’s, Hex Dispensers, etc.). They have toured with groups such as The Black Angels (band) (in the UK, Europe and U.S.), Roky Erickson, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Strange Boys, Black Lips and The Growlers.
Morgan Delt: “Psychic Death Hole,” the ultra-limited six-song cassette released early in 2013, introduced the world to Morgan Delt’s self-produced, genre-bending flavor of brown acid-dosed flowerdelia. Equal parts Odyssey & Oracle’ and ‘Parable of Arable Land’ Morgan Delt’s debut S/T LP expands on those initial tracks and brings forth one a fully realized glimpse into the California native’s twisted brain.
Morgan cites influences from Curt Boettcher to West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and rounds it out with golden age sunset stip heavies like The Byrds and Love. It’s all in there—obsessively studied, mastered and then mutated. Side one opens with the one/two punch of ‘Make My Grey Brain Green’ and ‘Barbarian Kings’ blasting apart 40 years of pop- psych and stitching it back together in a way that is both familiar but also refreshingly new. ‘Beneath the Black and Purple’ soars with a chiming guitar grumble right out of ‘8 Miles High.’’ & “Chakra Sharks” squirms it’s way out of the speakers like a snake – oiled up with the stink of not only what came before, but what’s happening NOW. The drums pound hard & heavy, while the backups “la la- la” all over your noggin like a Frankenstein version of The Flaming Lips & Thee Oh Sees. Each track worms its way into your brain and takes hold. The finale, ‘Main Title Sequence,’ is all Stu Phillips- worship, right out of the soundtrack to your favorite 60’s cult classic with it’s angelic backing vocals and lilting tremolo lead but somehow still buzzes with a modern current. As Morgan so keenly described his notion on the current state of genre bending music “I think we’ve become unstuck in time and everything is going to happen all at once from now on.”
Holy Wave: Originally formed in El Paso, Texas, Holy Wave carefully combines fluid forms of sacred surf sounds, droning riffs, and group vocals that haunt and harmonize in equal measure. The band made the move to Austin and released Knife Hits, The Evil Has Landed, and Evil Hits, a compilation featuring select tracks from the band’s prior output, and the band’s first release on The Reverberation Appreciation Society. The band’s second LP, Relax, was released in 2014 and saw the band expanding both their sound and their membership, recording for the first time as a five-piece. The band followed up Relax with Evil Hits Part II, a collection of B-sides and demos, released as a limited edition 10? EP.
Holy Wave return with their 3rd studio LP, Freaks Of Nurture, to be released via The Reverberation Appreciation Society on March 11, 2016. Recorded at Cacophony Recorders in Austin, TX by Erik Wofford (Explosions In The Sky, The Black Angels, My Morning Jacket), the album will be available for pre-sale purchase February 11. Holy Wave has toured extensively around the states and internationally, including support for GOAT and Psychic Ills, and festival appearances at SXSW, CMJ, Incubate, and every year at LEVITATION (formerly Austin Psych Fest) since 2011, including the upcoming 2016 edition.
Froth are a band specializing in dream-like, garage-influenced psychedelic rock with indie rock guitar figures, though at one point they were briefly planning on making silence their game. Joo Joo Ashworth and Jeff Fribourg were two friends from El Segundo, California with a passion for music and a sense of humor, and they dreamed up Froth as a fake band, planning to send out publicity photos and tales of their adventures on the road without actually performing a note. Ashworth and Fribourg even had a friend at a vinyl pressing plant who offered to help them spread the hoax by pressing an LP that would feature 20 minutes of silence as long as the “band” provided Froth emblazoned sleeves to pack them in. However, in 2012, fate forced Ashworth and Fribourg’s hands when Fribourg staged a small-scale music festival called Ourbq, and one of the acts canceled at the last minute. With no one else to take their place, Froth played their first live set, with Ashworth on vocals and guitar and Fribourg on Omnichord, an electronic variation on the autoharp. With Jeremy Katz on bass and Cameron Allen on drums, Froth played a show that Fribourg dubbed “a disaster,” but it prompted the musicians to actually begin writing songs and rehearsing. Before long, Froth were playing regularly in the Los Angeles area, and in June 2013, they released their first single, “Lost My Mind,” which reappeared a month later on the group’s debut album, Patterns, released by Lolipop Records. The album received strong reviews, and Froth were soon touring in the U.S., Europe, and the UK. By the time Froth began work on their second album, Jeff Fribourg had left the band, and Cole Devine joined the lineup on guitar, changing the sonic palette of the band a bit and increasing the strength of their guitar attack. In May 2015, Froth released their sophomore album, Bleak, through the celebrated L.A. indie label Burger Records. ~ Mark Deming
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