BRATTLEBORO — In honor of the vintage English nursery rhyme ("Thursday's child has far to go"), Epsilon Spires presents a midweek lineup on Thursday, Oct. 19, of three far-ranging musical acts, each one pushing the boundaries of song styles and genres.
The common denominator? All earned the bulk of their musical cred in New England.
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang of Damon & Naomi began playing music together in the late 1980s as the rhythm section, co-songwriters, and sometimes singers, with guitarist Dean Wareham, in the Boston-based band, Galaxie 500.
Their atmospheric, lo-fi psych drew comparisons to local hero Jonathan Richman, the Velvet Underground, and Spacemen 3. Their music also caught the attention of legendary mononymous producer and Shimmy Disc record label head Kramer, who worked with the band on most of their albums and EPs.
After Galaxie 500 split up in 1991, Krukowski and Yang released one three-song EP under the moniker Pierre Étoile, and then decided to call it quits in the music world. The pair shifted their creative focus to their independent book-publishing company, Exact Change.
But that plan didn't last long.
Kramer pulled them back into the studio, where, as Damon & Naomi, they recorded the album More Sad Hits, released in 1992. From there, Krukowski and Yang teamed up with Kate Biggar and Wayne Rogers, of Crystalized Movements, to form a four-piece psych-rock band, Magic Hour, putting out three LPs in the mid-'90s.
Meanwhile, Krukowski and Yang continued recording as Damon & Naomi and began shedding the "psych" part of their sound in favor of dreamy acoustic stylings. The duo released records on Shimmy Disc, Rough Trade, and Sub Pop before forming their own label, 20-20-20, in 2005.
Damon & Naomi spent the late '90s and early '00s recording albums in their own studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts; touring; collaborating with Japanese psych band Ghost; publishing books; and helping produce a two-DVD set of Galaxie 500 videos.
Yang recently wrote, directed, and photographed a feature-length boxing documentary, Never Be a Punching Bag for Nobody, for which she also recorded the film's original soundtrack.
Pitchfork called Damon & Naomi's most recent album, A Sky Record (2021, 20-20-20) "a calming and tender reflection on appreciating what you have in uncertain times."
And Aquarium Drunkard noted the album "is one of Damon & Naomi's most purely gorgeous sounding records - and considering the glories of what's come before, that's a real accomplishment."
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Second on the bill is Dredd Foole, also known as Dredd Foole & the Din, the stage name of Brattleboro resident Dan Ireton. Dredd Foole also got its musical start in Boston, this time in the fertile early-1980s post-punk and experimental power-pop scene.
Ireton, as Dredd Foole, recorded the two-song single "Songs in Heat" with Mission of Burma as his backing band. A live recording of this combo, captured during two 1983 Boston gigs, was released in August as "Dredd Foole & the Din: We Will Fall" on the Chicago label Corbett vs. Dempsey. After Mission of Burma (temporarily) split up in 1983, a spinoff group, Volcano Suns, backed up Dredd Foole for countless live performances and two LPs.
Dredd Foole's presence in the underground scene coincided with the rise in popularity of the influential, Boston-based independent music magazine Forced Exposure. Ireton's studio releases and live performances were frequently and lovingly covered by THIS publication that leaned heavily toward the acerbic.
In one review, the publication's founder, Jimmy Johnson, wrote: "Fact is, with this gig and another the following week at [the Boston music venue] the Rat, [Dredd Foole] made a firm bid for consideration as the best in-the-flesh band around, period. Forget any qualifiers. That good. [...]Other bands did play, but after this, who could care?"
In the early '90s, Forced Exposure released on its own record label what would be Dredd Foole's last album for an entire decade, In Quest of Tense. In it, Ireton leans more heavily into psychedelic folk, a harbinger of things to come.
After moving to Brattleboro in 2000, Ireton resumed his musical activity and not only found himself among adherents of the southeast Vermont/western Massachusetts New Weird America scene, but he also helped create it.
After performing in the 2003 Brattleboro Free Folk Festival, Ireton's current output and previous works received the attention from critics and other musicians they deserved, and Ireton was recognized as a highly influential presence in the nascent freak-folk world.
Like Half Japanese and Sunburned Hand of the Man (the latter of which Ireton has recorded and performed with), Dredd Foole's music has helped bridge the gap between punk rock and experimental psych-folk.
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One of the area artists Ireton has collaborated with is Matt Valentine, who brings one of his bands, Wet Tuna, to this event's lineup.
Wet Tuna is comprised of Valentine and Erika Elder. Elder and Valentine also record and perform under the name "MV + EE." Combining jammy psych and heady dub, Wet Tuna's 2018 debut album, Livin' the Die (Feeding Tube Records, 2018), included liner notes written by former Forced Exposure writer - and current Feeding Tube co-owner - Byron Coley.
Coley's description firmly placed Wet Tuna in the long lineage of hippie-punk genre-benders such as Gong, Hawkwind, and Faust: "Around these spumes of electric menace you'll find rings of crazy space burble and vocals so deeply layered they sound like something happening in the back of Daevid Allen's brain. But large swathes of the album are rurally expansive, as befits the mountainside on which it was recorded."
Since then, Wet Tuna has recorded 14 LPs for Three Lobed Recordings and Valentine and Elder's own label, Child of Microtones, one live album from a 2017 performance at Greenfield's The Root Cellar (now known as 10 Forward), and they have played on numerous area stages.
It's a rare delight to see three acts, with so much regional musical history and influence, on one bill.
Don't miss this one.
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Damon & Naomi, Dredd Foole, and Wet Tuna on Thursday, Oct. 19, at Epsilon Spires, 190 Main St., Brattleboro. Doors open at 7:30 p.m., and music starts at 8 p.m. Admission is sliding scale, starting at $10. For more information and tickets, visit epsilonspires.org.
Wendy M. Levy, a former reporter and columnist for this newspaper, is the host of the radio program "Wreck Your Own Adventure" on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio, which airs Mondays, from 3 to 6 p.m., at wfmu.org/playlists/WY. The Commons' Deeper Dive column gives artists, arts organizations, and other nonprofits elbow room to write in first person and/or be unabashedly opinionated, passionate, and analytical about their own creative work and events.
This The Arts column by Wendy M. Levy was written for The Commons.