Tetra Music Project will host FutureDream 3 and feature emerging EDM, hip-hop and rock artists on two stages.
Kim Tetra Wiesner will bring the sparkle and soundtrack of spring to Detroit three months early.
The Ypsilanti electronic, chillwave and world bass vocalist-guitarist, aka Tetra Music Project, will host an indoor visual art and live music garden party Dec. 21 at Tangent Gallery. It will be an exhilarating visual and auditory experience to awaken the mind, body and spirit during the winter solstice.
“Instead of trying to set up a bunch of shows throughout the year, I really just focus on the one big, extravagant performance, and I like to have it be this really art-centered display of people who I personally find are very talented and dedicated to what they do,” Wiesner said.
“I like to give everybody a decent amount of time to perform and make it worth their while. I curate the event in a way that I can get behind, and I have people who have a good attitude and a good vibe about them.”
Outside of art and music, FutureDream 3 will donate festival proceeds to the St. Clair Butterfly Foundation, an Auburn Hills nonprofit that uses creative arts, mindfulness and mentorship programs to help youth overcome trauma.
“If I’m putting an event together, usually it has some sort of cause involved, and we may or may not make a whole lot of money to donate or contribute, but we focus on it, make a little bit and say, ‘Well hey, we did our best,’” Wiesner said.
Nick Behnan combines rock, hip-hop, funk and R&B on his latest solo single, “Right at Home.”
As an accomplished songwriter, guitarist and producer, Nick Behnan magically fuses the infectious sounds of the Motor City.
He solders raw urban elements of rock, hip-hop, funk and R&B together on his latest single, “Right at Home,” which dropped today via all streaming platforms.
The three-minute track blends pounding drums and roaring guitars with stuck-in-your-head verses and flavorful rhymes from soul vocalist Kendrick Hardaway and rapper Saint Diggidy – “The bass drum kickin’ and the guitar screamin’/I feel right at home/Nobody talkin’ about what’s the meanin’.”
“The song is inspired by those times when you feel right at home,” said Behnan, who opted to remain in Detroit for his music career. “You’re with the right group of people, you eat the right meal, you listen to the right album, you’ve got the right bottle of whiskey, and everybody feels comfortable in their own skin.”
Behnan invited Hardaway and Saint Diggidy to add a strong hip-hop, funk and R&B feel to the rock-based track, which initially started as a stripped-down demo on SoundCloud. Hardaway and Saint Diggidy added their own verses to elevate and enrich the multi-genre track.
“I wanted to bring more of an old-school feel like Rick Rubin did for the Beastie Boys and bring more of that Run-DMC-approach to their voice,” Behnan said. “It mixes the urban funk sounds with rock because those are both embedded in my ear. I like music that has both of those vibes in there.”
Pretty Tied Up Guns N’ Roses tribute band will headline a Saturday show at Road Rangers in Taylor. Photo by LUX Artist Management
Five hard rock musicians will rope in bangers from Guns N’ Roses Saturday night.
Pretty Tied Up, a Michigan-Kentucky GNR tribute band, will unleash their favorite Axl, Slash, Izzy, Duff and Matt renditions as part of a headlining set at Road Rangers in Taylor.
“Let’s just say everything from ‘Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide’ up until ‘Spaghetti Incident’ is going to be on the table,” said Brandon Fields, aka Slash. “That’s the good thing about being in a tribute to Guns is that they’ve got such a deep catalog. We might have some special guests jamming with us as well.”
Fields will jam with bandmates Kevin Shannon (Axl Rose), Kyle Mikolajczyk (Izzy Stradlin), Dustin Witt (Duff McKagan) and Garrett Ramsden (Matt Sorum) for one of their final 2019 appearances in metro Detroit.
He formed the project earlier this year with Mikolajczyk and Ramsden after their previous GNR tribute band, Uzi Suicide, went on hiatus.
“Guns N’ Roses is my favorite band of all time. These are songs I’ve always wanted to play live and couldn’t necessarily pull off in my other projects,” Fields said. “I made the Facebook page before the band lineup was even finished, and Kyle instantly shot me a message asking what was up with it.”
After teaming up with Mikolajczyk and Ramsden, Fields invited longtime best friend and multi-instrumentalist Witt to join the lineup as well as hard rock vocalist Shannon. The quintet quickly blew up the hard rock music scene in Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee with growing roster of live dates.
“Obviously, whoever is doing Axl’s job is going to have the main attraction in my opinion, so you’ve got to have somebody who’s going to put on a show. Kevin does a good job. Kyle, Dustin and Garrett do an awesome job of holding the rhythm section down as well. Garrett is an absolute monster behind the kit, and I don’t think there’s anybody who would be a better fit for us,” said Fields, who lives in Lexington, Ky., and named the band after a GNR “Use Your Illusion II” track.
“Dustin’s a very smart musician and has been my partner in crime for a few years since he joined my solo band. You never have to worry about him messing up. Kyle plays everything he needs at the right time. He’s in like 10 different bands, and you definitely don’t get to a point like that being an amateur.”
Sunny State emits positive vibes through their uplifting reggae fusion. Photo by Arabela Espinoza
Sunny State keeps summer’s bright, carefree spirit alive well into the dark days of winter.
The San Jose, Calif., reggae fusion sextet instantly transports listeners to a three-minute mind trip filled with calm breezes, warm rays and stolen moments on their latest single, “When You Know.” It’s the kind of uplifting sonic magic that keeps people young at heart, full of love and ready for adventure.
“Life can be so heavy that we really need to enjoy the ability to let loose ourselves and embrace the positive vibes that music can bring to us. I think that’s just a byproduct of what we get to share with other people,” said Chris Reed, Sunny State’s lead vocalist, ukulelist and guitarist. “They get to forget their worries for that amount of time they’re listening to us in their car or on the dance floor while we’re playing live.”
“When You Know” also celebrates Reed’s longtime relationship with his wife and reminisces about their first date as teenagers while driving south along U.S. 101 toward Los Angeles.
Bright acoustic guitars and vibrant synths fill the ears as swaying reggae island bass floods the soul – “First it was a drive in my blue ’69/Didn’t have no map/We just headed south/We pulled off the road/Got out and climbed that hill/It was our first kiss/I was under your spell.”
“I’ve loved that woman for so long now through all the ups and downs that every relationship goes through. The birth of our first daughter, Violet, catapulted my love to the next level, and then a second time with Indigo,” Reed said. “I mean there’s so much love there. We joke around with our kids like how can we feel this much love for them, and our relationship together prefaced from that.”
Compression is the process of reducing the dynamic difference between the loudest and the quietest parts of an audio sample. Photo by Mattieu A
By Nicole Bouwkamp
Have you ever listened to music for a while before suddenly feeling exhausted? Or having to turn your favorite song off because you just needed some silence? Have you driven a long way listening to the radio only to have your ears become sore and sounds muted? Ear fatigue, often felt as tiredness and a soreness, loss of sensitivity, discomfort of the ears, is caused by prolonged exposure to sound.
Thanks to the trends of music and listening environments today, ear fatigue can be experienced anywhere at any time. You just need to turn on the radio and listen for a while before you feel it or listen to music on headphones from a streaming service while in a crowd. Today’s music is part of the equation of experiencing ear fatigue. More specifically, a tool used to create music and broadcast it online and on the radio: compression.
Compression is the process of reducing the dynamic difference between the loudest and the quietest parts of an audio sample – the loud material gets quieter, and the quiet material gets louder. This is why a song may be described as punchy or having presence. The frequencies of the recorded sound are at naturally varying levels, and when compression brings up the softer frequencies and brings down the louder frequencies, the result is a more present and punchier sound (or as I like to say, a beefy sound).
Compression is often used when recording drums. Drums are the biggest producers of transient sounds, meaning that they are a loud sound with lots of attack, but decay in sound very quickly to where there is very little sound beyond that first attack. With compression, the attack is brought down in volume while the sound left after the attack is brought up. Frequencies that are naturally dynamically different are brought closer together, and you get a beefier recorded drum hit.
So, you hear everything better. That would be good with music, right?
The thing is, everything in music isn’t meant to be heard evenly all the time. One of the glories of music is the dynamic range and nuances within it, the little hidden gems of musical ideas that you discover after listening to a song multiple times, or the rise and fall of moments that can evoke emotions of triumph or despair. If there is a part of the music that grows from soft and intricate to loud and powerful, you need to actually (not) fully hear everything in relation to each other.
With compression, everything is louder, and we tend to lose the dynamic range of the music. The small nuances become more prominent and muddy the main melodies and harmonies, the rise and fall of dynamics becomes flatter, and “imperfect” playing is homogenized. This trend has been growing for nearly 30 years now, and no music is safe.
This isn’t to say that compression is bad by any means, it can actually be vital in the recording process to achieve a cleaner signal from a particularly temperamental drum, or to even out the sound from a singer who is not familiar with distancing the mic properly when they sing. Compression when cleaning the recorded sounds in the mixing process can be useful for achieving a better balanced song in the end, but I prefer to control the volume manually.
I will work harder to control the overall dynamics if it means I can keep the more natural dynamic sound of the instruments throughout. However, my ideas on how music should sound are my opinion, I will admit, and the opinion contrary to mine follows the idea of slapping compression on all the instruments for the entire song to get a more even dynamic range. This method has been steadily ruining how we listen to music for decades.
Bruce Soord and The Pineapple Thief will make their first metro Detroit live appearance Saturday at The Crofoot in Pontiac. Photo by Steve Brown
The Pineapple Thief will steal the spotlight Saturday night in metro Detroit.
The British prog rock quartet will make their long-awaited Motor City live debut at The Crofoot in Pontiac as part of a 22-date North American tour.
Bruce Soord (guitars, vocals), Steve Kitch (keys), Jon Sykes (bass, backing vocals) and Gavin Harrison (drums, percussion) have embarked on their first North American tour in support of 2018’s “Dissolution,” a splendid nine-track album via Kscope Records that poetically chronicles the impact of social media on people’s lives and society.
“Over the last four years since ‘Your Wilderness’ came out, the band’s just gotten bigger, and we were playing to more people. The modern band is quite weird because you get so much data to analyze, so you look at your Spotify listeners, where your Facebook people are coming from, and you can see where people are,” said Soord, who formed the band in 1999.
“We knew the USA was the big market for us. Obviously, it’s a very big place, so it’s difficult, but we knew that Germany, the U.K., and the USA were the three big territories that are into The Pineapple Thief. Since we’ve been selling more records, we were able to afford to do it.”
Audra Kubat will release her seventh album, “The Sliver & the Salve,” Friday via Whistle Pig Records. Photo by Allan Barnes
For Audra Kubat, life brings a series of dualities that challenge and change the soul.
Those dualities inspire her to create magical sonic epiphanies that instantly resonate with listeners on “The Sliver & the Salve,” a spectacular 10-track odyssey that drops Friday and looks inward and outward at the self, society and the cosmos.
“I feel like this album for me was recognizing that there were these dualities and sort of contradictions, these internal and external things going on. I wanted then to connect that also with the way we treat each other, treat ourselves and treat the earth,” said Kubat, a Detroit indie folk singer-songwriter.
“Those three ideas, the way we treat ourselves, the way we treat each other and the way we treat the land are what really define us. Our impact is limited, expounded or accentuated by our ability to be fully ourselves, to be gracious to others and to take care of the land.”
Throughout “The Sliver & the Salve,” Kubat brilliantly addresses relatable themes of inner strength, personal freedom and growth, tumultuous relationships, emotional upheavals and environmental stewardship.
Selections from ‘The Sliver & the Salve’
“The Sliver & the Salve” album artwork
As a follow-up to 2016’s acoustically-minded “Mended Vessel,” Kubat’s latest album via Whistle Pig Records showcases a carefully crafted batch of songs that evoke deep reflections against a backdrop of elegant instrumentation.
Each song highlights the challenges of everyday life experiences and the difficult choices people make to progress. The gorgeous opening track, “Some Comfort,” depicts the courageous mindset of a woman who escapes an abusive relationship and ponders a new life ahead.
“It’s about exploring things in life that are little bit more mysterious,” she said. “It’s about my music, that world and everything that I want my music to inspire and evoke in people. It’s an introduction to me and my music.”
Faidia makes a mesmerizing introduction on “Mystic Mind,” which features soft, ethereal vocals woven with vibrant, atmospheric electric guitars and deep synths – “Take a ride into my mystic mind/You’ll have the time of your life/And if you see my soul looks like it’s fool’s gold/It’s all yours/You can indulge.”
She takes listeners on a “ride into that electric sky” to open and free the mind to new possibilities. The track itself serves as a four-minute escape into a romantic realm that lies somewhere in between “Edward Scisscorhands” and “The Shape of Water.”
Interestingly, Faidia recorded two versions of the track at Metro 37 Recording Studio in Rochester Hills with producer and engineer Kevin Sharp. Both versions are similar with the exception of a newly added guitar solo from Motor City multi-genre vocalist and guitarist Kyle Mikolajczyk.
Faidia started working with Mikolajczyk earlier this year after meeting him through mutual friend and bassist Cameron Shawcross. The trio also added drummer Garrett Ramsden to the lineup.
“Kyle’s really involved in the music scene. He’s also playing with me, and as of now, we’ve done stuff in the studio,” Faidia said. “We don’t have any live performances scheduled right now because we’re in the process of doing a lot of different things.”
Drinking Mercury will host an album release show Saturday at The Robin Theatre in Lansing.
Editor’s Note: Fans can now pre-order Drinking Mercury’s self-titled album on vinyl with a bonus download of alternate mixes, live recordings and demos.
In this case, the Lansing indie rock quartet’s newest album functions as a sonic potion drenching listeners in soothing waves of vibrant folk-influenced dream pop.
“We knew that was the kind of record we wanted to make. Michael Boyes and I had done a lot of acoustic shows together, or rather where he played acoustic and I played electric,” said Tommy McCord, Drinking Mercury’s guitarist and vocalist, about the band’s latest release out today via GTG Records.
“We had focused on embracing that sort of finger style-like folky guitar playing and bringing that in with more textural and psychedelic stuff. From there, it was a matter of filling in the arrangements, but we all knew we wanted to have the vocals be really prominent and arranged on the album.”
Soaring vocal harmonies intertwined with slow, thumping drumbeats, driving basslines and gentle acoustic and electric guitars abound on the band’s striking follow-up to 2011’s alt-folk debut, “Orcades.”
Recording Drinking Mercury, Split Album with The Soods
To create the album’s laid-back feel, McCord invited longtime friends and bandmates Boyes (guitar, vocals), Timmy Rodriguez (bass, keys, vocals) and Kevin Adams (drums) to his family’s 60-year-old rustic cabin in Bitely last July to record new material.
“It’s like the cliché of getting back to nature to write your masterpiece. My grandpa and some other guys built this cabin in the early ‘50s, so I’ve been going there my whole life. I had thought in a daydream it would be cool to record an album up here,” said McCord, who co-formed Drinking Mercury nearly 20 years ago with Adams while growing up in Ionia.
“It’s not like it’s a big acoustically awesome space. It’s just a pretty simple cabin, but it’s in a beautiful area, and the atmosphere is really relaxed, and your cell phone doesn’t work there, and there’s no internet.”
The WSU student-run label and organization will host a multimedia launch event Jan. 17 in Detroit.
A new homegrown record label will cultivate fresh sounds in the Motor City.
Known as Old Main Records, the Wayne State University (WSU) student-run label and organization will help local, regional and national artists record, release and perform original music.
“The idea of actually doing a record label at Wayne State as a student organization had been around for a while since I was a freshman taking the classes. People would say, ‘Oh, it would be great if it happened,’ but nobody actually really did it,” said Brendan Derey, Old Main Records president and a music business senior.
“Another friend and I actually did start it together. Over the summer, we got a small group of people in the room talking about our ideas, and then it snowballed from there.”
Today, Old Main Records has 20 student members, including three other leads besides Derey – Patrick Norton, creative director; Christopher Simpson, social media and marketing director; and David Jackowicz, recording and distribution director.
Named after and housed in the iconic 19th century WSU academic building at Cass and Warren avenues, Old Main Records also partners with two WSU Department of Music lecturers Jeremy Peters and Michael Shellabarger.
“One of the things we’re trying to do with the label is create a hub. One of the benefits of being a Wayne State student organization is that there are a lot of people with a lot of different backgrounds, whether that’s art, film, business, music tech or music business,” Derey said. “There are just a ton of people around who are willing to do this kind of grassroots organization.”
Patrick Norton and his Dirt Room bandmates are helping students work through the process of signing an artist to the label. Photo by Matt Hamilton
With a team in place, Old Main Records is currently setting up the independent label’s infrastructure, accepting and reviewing artist submissions, applying for grants and creating internal processes. It also will provide students with opportunities in event promotion, marketing, recording and distribution and launch a crowdfunding campaign soon.
“They want to turn this into a class or an outlet for music business majors to use. It helps everybody out because part of the goal of the record label is to give resources out to artists,” said Norton, a music technology senior and director of do-it-yourself (DIY) Detroit music-art space Nice Place. “We’re really looking to help build the local community and give promotional and marketing support to artists.”
To demonstrate that support, Norton’s band Dirt Room, a Detroit experimental indie rock quintet, is serving as a pilot artist for Old Main Records. Along with Norton, Dirt Room bandmates Samuel Sprague, Simon Sprague, Cam Frank and Matt Hagger are helping students work through the process of signing an artist to the label.
Dirt Room is also featured on a “Nice Plays: Local Detroit Underground” Spotify playlist, which includes dozens of emerging Motor City artists across a multitude of genres. All artists added to the playlist have submitted their music for consideration to Old Main Records.
As Old Main Records finalizes its first round of artists to sign, it will host a multimedia launch event in partnership with Nice Place and feature live music and visual art Jan. 17 at St. Andrew’s Church in Detroit. Dirt Room, The Stools, Mac Saturn and Craig Garwood will perform at the label’s event.
“We’re taking twice as much time to do every small step now with the label, so in the future, these will be easy processes, and everybody will know what to do going forward,” Derey said. “We’re hoping for January and February to start recording projects with those groups, and then have our first releases as well coming down this year.”
Finally, Old Main Records will partner with WSU to preserve and digitize an extensive catalog of audio archives that date back to the ‘30s. It will be a multi-year project to convert audio recordings on cassette, vinyl and wire to digital formats for future preservation.
The Stratton Setlist 