Matt And Kim with Donnis
October 21 at The Canal Club

There may not be anything more triumphant than a Matt and Kim show. Standing side-by-side with wide grins and excitement in their eyes, the two performers stared at an audience sharing the same sentiments. One could only imagine what the duo had in store for Richmond, Virginia.

The night began with a listening of Matt and Kim’s new record, Sidewalks. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of this presentation. Actually, though, it’s a really effective way of introducing an audience to a new album. Chances are that if you download the album online, the quality will suffer immensely. To hear it through the speakers at the Canal Club was a delight, and I look forward to getting a copy upon its release in November.

Knowing Matt and Kim’s affinity for Top 40 Hip-Hop made Donnis an obvious choice as an opener. Their role was to get the audience hyped up for the headliners and that’s exactly what they accomplished. Several of the songs blended together and I wouldn’t call it the most memorable set, but it was entertaining nonetheless. While onstage, the group spoke about how embarking on this tour had been a test on their nerves. After a few tour stops, they were now comfortable with the crowds and had a blast, along with everyone in attendance.

The floor of the Canal Club would not stop rumbling throughout all of Matt and Kim’s set. The entire audience was going insane, and the band couldn’t help but reciprocate the joy they felt, having a crowd ready to get wild. There was an open and free rapport in the way the performers and the audience interacted. Perhaps the audience had changed since the days of the group playing basement shows at the now-defunct Bonezone, but the enthusiasm was still there.

One of the best elements of their set was its focus on material from their self-titled release and Grand. The way that these records are recorded and produced makes it tough for the band to recreate these songs live. By displaying their new album in its entirety at the beginning of the show, it allowed Matt and Kim to focus their energies on celebrating their back catalog. Doing so exemplified the confidence of their stage show, making for a memorable performance that never let up.

Various Artists – The New Hope (Smog Veil)

I’m not the first, and certainly not the most eloquent, to use the idea of punk rock in its earliest years as a counterbalance to the excesses and failures of the first hippie era’s tail end. What started as an earnest attempt to change the world for the better ended up with a bunch of self-congratulatory nostalgia, an elitist group constantly patting each other on the back because the public can now buy granola in the grocery store and tie-dyed shirts at the mall. The same group shot themselves in the foot by accepting the condescending half-measures offered by mainstream society and by treating subsequent generations of interested participants with distrust, as potential consumers at best. Punk was supposed to be more egalitarian. In the instances where that promise was fulfilled, you made your own noise where you were and you dressed and acted as you wanted, society be damned. While that ideal was rarely lived up to, there were moments when it seemed a palpable alternative to both society’s apathetic conformity and the failed idealism of past countercultural movements. That some of the best and most ferocious American punk and hardcore bands came from outside genre hotbeds like San Francisco, New York, and D.C. is testament to this ideal. All the frustration and ennui of small-town lives eroding under the weight of the era’s seismic economic and cultural shifts, channeled into ninety-second blasts overflowing with the sort of piss and vinegar that makes the fashionable nihilism of the bands’ better-known counterparts seem tame in comparison.

It was this sort of band that Tom Dark and Tom Miller compiled on The New Hope, a compilation of Northeast Ohio bands originally released in 1983, and recently reissued by Smog Veil Records. Bands too abrasive, too unconventional, and in some cases simply too young to record and tour were given an opportunity to carve out whatever niche they could. Many of the contributions constituted a band's first and only recording. The name itself is a good indication of the compilers’ idealist intentions, laying bare their hopes that the artists could provide some sort of jump start for a musical style that was supposed to be earth-shattering but rarely even broke its own conventions. The album was, and remains, a successful chronicle of a time and place. However, the reissue possesses a handful of elements which, while not detracting from the music, can leave a bit of a sour aftertaste–-at least, for those listeners inclined to pore over liner notes.

While both compilers did an excellent job in creating The New Hope, much of what they write for their retrospective contributions to the reissue borders on the sort of “kids today just don’t get it” attitude that was the downfall of the hippie forbears that punk sought to supercede. For that matter, it's also been the downfall of many of their disenchanted punk contemporaries whose contributions have fallen by the wayside. There is certainly nothing wrong with discussing the difficulties and rewards of creating independent music at a time when the practice was not commonplace. Recollections such as these contribute to the larger picture of a subculture and can help nip younger generations’ ahistorical self-importance in the bud. However, when the liner notes suggest that, after the first generation of bands and venues in the area dissipated, “the real hardcore was gone,” it ignores the subsequent quarter-century of excellent bands-–from Face Value and Integrity to the H100s and Gordon Solie Motherfuckers--that the region has produced. It also comes off somewhat dismissive towards the efforts of the label that reissued the album, as well as many others from Ohio’s past and present. While the liner notes take Stephen Blush’s American Hardcore to task for passing over the vibrant scenes in Cleveland and Akron, they often fall into the same trap that undermined that book’s relevance--the idea that any hardcore made after 1985 or so lacks any value worth mentioning, an idea proven wrong so many times that it really should have fallen out of favor by now.

Ideological differences and grumpy old man bashing aside, however, the album itself is absolutely essential for the legions of punks nowadays immersing themselves in the fringes of older punk. All the kids out there preparing to spend a few months’ rent money on a GISM album (which is going to be a bootleg) would be well-advised to shell out the fifteen bucks for this instead. Not that the bands presented here rely on psychosis alone. While bands like PPG or the Offbeats have somewhat of a melodic side, and while a band like The Guns-–possibly the best band on the compilation, and all of its members were fourteen and fifteen years old at the time of this recording(!)–-don’t sound far removed from fellow Midwesterners like The Necros or Negative Approach, other bands included aren’t so easily categorized. Bands like No Parole and The Dark possess a dissonant, unhinged quality that’s difficult to accurately explain. To even describe the bands in terms of notes or chords isn’t exactly accurate, as they often play parts falling outside of the conventional 12-tone melodicism upon which Western music has been based. Though not sloppy in a way that distracts from the music, bands like these sound as if the songs (and the performers, for that matter) are in the process of falling apart at the seams. While a substantial amount of punk pays lip-service to chaos and noise, very few bands actually step outside the iron-fisted boundaries of verse-chorus-verse structures to attain something more transcendently wrong. And unlike the handful of bands, especially in recent years, who actively attempt to sound noisy and disjointed, one gets the impression that these older bands were less self-conscious about it, pursuing their gnarled jumble of sound more intuitively.

While The New Hope is a compilation that belongs to a certain time and place, it’s more than simply a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Though it suffers somewhat from the bitterness of its retrospection, the music is left intact as a reminder of what can be accomplished by a small pocket of individuals possessing equal parts frustration and creativity, informed by themselves and their own experiences, more than a drive to conform to the ostensible nonconformity of their contemporaries. The bands presented are a reminder of what can make punk rock great: a drive to create something vibrant and individualist, in the midst of the erosion of subcultural identity and its incorporation into mass-cultural stagnation. Its inexorable link with the past is not validated by a “we were there when it mattered” attitude, but by the vivacity of the material contained therein.

What looks at quick glance to be a flat 2-D painting is actually a combination of performance art, photography, and painting. Alex Meade has broken new ground by taking her real life subjects and painting them into her paintings, literally to make them 3-D. With television and movies going down this road, it only makes sense that art would follow suit.

Check out the video below to see the process.

Check out her site for more - www.alexameade.com

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Alexa Meade is a 23-year-old artist based in Washington, DC. She is represented by Irvine Contemporary. Alexa Meade has innovated a Trompe-L’Oeil painting technique that can perceptually compress three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional plane. Her work is a fusion of installation, painting, performance, photography, and video art.

Rather than painting a representational picture on a flat canvas, Meade paints her representational image directly on top of her three-dimensional subjects. The subject and its representation become one and the same. Essentially, her art imitates life on top of life.

Meade’s approach to portraiture questions our understanding of the body and identity. Meade coats her models with a mask of paint, obscuring the body while intimately exposing it, creating an unflinchingly raw account of the person. The painted second skin perceptually dissolves the body into a 2D caricature. The subjects become art objects as they are transformed into re-interpretations of themselves. In turn, the models’ identities become altered by their new skin, embodying Meade’s dictated definition of their image to the viewer.

Meade’s project plays on the tensions between being and permanence. The physical painting exists only for mere hours and is obliterated when the model sheds its metaphorical skin. What endures is an artifact of the performance, a 2D photograph extracted from the 3D scene. The photographic presentations create a tension between the smoothness of the physical photographs and the tactility of the painted installations captured within them, blurring the lines between what is depicted and depiction itself.

Welcome to the November edition of The Jams of Terry. This month, we will be exploring the slick r’n’b of the 1980s, when hair relaxer was not ironic. Thanks to Mikey P. AKA Hang Glider for the input. With no further ado, I present to you... Buppie Jams!

1. Billy Ocean “Caribbean Queen”
In 1986, my father bought a CD player and two CDs: some fucking contemporary Fleetwood Mac album, and Suddenly by Billy Ocean. This was during that brief period when the CD jewel case came in a tall cardboard box, to discourage thieves. The Billy Ocean CD box was this giant turquoise thing that sat on a shelf in our house’s den for years. Dad was already known to pick one song and play it, ad nauseum, for weeks. This small CD collection made the habit all the more real. Thanks to that, nearly a quarter of a century later, I can sing the entire saxophone solo in “Caribbean Queen.”

2. Luther Vandross “Never Too Much”
This is the joint. Just yesterday, my boss was saying, “I like fat Luther better... and crackhead Mary J. Blige. Sorry.” The woman is right! These ‘80s videos are entertaining as well. I love how the different boomboxes and gigantic Walkmen are implying that the whole wide world is pumping Luther. Now, someone get me that jogging jacket with the boysenberry yogurt-colored highlights. Quick question-–why is it amazing to walk around with a brick-sized Walkman on your hip, but those cellphone beltclips are only worn by embarrassing stepdads?

3. The Whispers “Keep on Lovin’ Me”
“Hey, we’re just five buddies with really clean teeth, who work together and spend our lunch breaks, plus the following evenings, twirling around our office park in suits. Life is good, huh?”

4. Primetime “I Want Somebody Tonight”
This is a bit of revisionist history, kind of like how modern day record nerds like to think that all teenagers in 1970 drove around listening to Big Star and Odessey and Oracle, when in all actuality, they probably just listened to the Osmonds or some crap like that. This Primetime record is an obscure ‘80s release that has been elevated from discount bin status in the last five years by collectors who have dubbed this era of synthesized soul “Modern Soul.” Right after I moved to NYC, the Joshes in Richmond found this record at Plan 9, and dropped a dollar on it on the strength of the cover. Whenever I came back to visit, this was our “5am, about to pass out” jam. We’d blast it in Bark’s room while Smalls yelled, “They had a perfectly good hit song... but they ruined it by scat singing!” Then their roommate Jen would come down the hall and tell us to shut the hell up. Sorry Jen. If you want to hear more under-the-radar r’n’b, Thes One from People Under the Stairs made a mix called Mustache Soul.

5. Junior “Mama Used To Say”
Here’s some more revisionist history. And what an awesome video. Maybe one day I too will sing to the ladies from a cartoon bathtub.

6. Earth Wind and Fire “Brazilian Rhyme”
Smalls, if you’re reading this, it is possible to be someone besides Cab Calloway and have a hit that consists mainly of scat singing. Unless I’m wicked ignorant, and he’s actually singing in Portuguese here. Hmm. On the real though, how many rap songs have sampled this? I’ve been living in Chicago for a little over two years, and something that I appreciate is this city’s high amount of civic pride. Chicago loves all things Chicago, and Earth Wind and Fire are among our favorite sons. I felt like I’d really arrived a month ago, on September 21st, when someone drove by me in Uptown, blasting “September” by EWF. That song’s leadoff lyric is “Do you remember/the twenty-first night of September?”

7. Jeffrey Osborne “You Should Be Mine”
Better known as “The Woo-Woo-Woo Song.” Here’s a way to find out if you’re going to like hanging out with a group of people: If things seem to be going well, get up like you’re going to the bar for a round, then say, “Hey, quick question, y’all,” and sing, “Can you woo-woo-woo?” Walk off, and if they laugh, feel free to sit back down with them.

8. Sade “Sweetest Taboo”
Where would this list be without a little quiet storm in the mix? Ahh, quiet storm, the official music of driving home at 5am with wrinkles in your suit and your dick still sticky.

9. Alexander O’Neal “Criticize”
Watch this, then a couple Robert Palmer clips, and ruminate on the whole “White people stealing ideas from black people” thing. Also, the drummer is going bananas. Tom Tom Magazine should write her up.

10. Phil Collins and Philip Bailey “Easy Lover”
What symbolizes the ambition of the ‘80s more than a music video that kicks off with a helicopter blasting into the air? Dear Philip Bailey, will you please give Phil Collins’ Charlie Brown-looking ass some of your clothes? That sweater vest makes him look like a manager at Best Buy.

I went into work last week and a friend of mine in the kitchen greeted me with, “I have something you need to hear.” This particular individual isn’t known for getting all that giddy over most things, so his robust enthusiasm caught my attention. Everybody else in the kitchen had seen the twinkle in his eye, and were working harder than usual to suppress their knowing giggles, so as not to spoil the surprise awaiting my virgin ears.

Here’s what he had to play.

This was recorded at my friend’s new apartment in the lower Fan. This is not a joke. He had just come home and was relaxing in his room when the sounds you are hopefully listening to as you read this invaded his post-work bliss.

Apparently, this went on for an hour or so. Most people would have called the police or at least made some attempt to get the noise to stop, but not the nameless one. No, he found great amusement in the piercing wails (if you listen closely, you can hear his muffled laughter). When he asked his roommate about the tortured sounds emanating from the other side of his bedroom wall, his roommate told him it happened about twice a month. At first, his roommate had been alarmed by the bi-monthly audio invasions, but he had gotten used to it over the time he had lived in the apartment.

They both thought it was funny.

As we stood in the kitchen listening to the 8-plus minutes of howling, we all took turns guessing as to what was making the gentlemen scream. The unanimous choice amongst us was that he was having something shoved up his ass. One chef guessed that the guy was a Chicago Bears fan who was related to DeAngelo Hall. That made all us Redskins fans laugh, but still--all joking aside--object in ass was our collective guess.

When I got home later that evening, I played the recording for my wife, expecting big laughs. When I hit play, she didn’t laugh. She remained silent. “Don’t you think that shit is funny?” I asked, troubled that she wasn’t getting it. She paused for a moment.

“It sounds like you having a cluster headache.”

Shit, it does. It’s been so long since I had one, I had almost forgotten the decades of agony those fuckers used to cause me. And it wasn’t just painful for me, either--my wife had to endure my screams during those episodes. When I listened closely, I could almost hear how she would think that. I tried to point out that my screams were those of genuine undesired physical pain, and the shrieks on the recording seem to take some devious, disturbing satisfaction from whatever is causing him to squeal. Having lived through those painful fuckers, I know the difference. “It’s the sound of a dude getting something shoved up his ass," I said with conviction, “He’s not having a cluster headache.”

She just walked away.

When you live in the city, you open yourself up to the possibility of hearing the people next-door shoving things in their ass. Not that people in the counties don’t shove things up their asses; you are just less likely to hear it. And as grotesque as it may seem, that’s why I live in the city. The increased possibility that I may hear my neighbor submit to his desire for putting objects in his rectum doesn’t bother me. I can’t say that I would actively seek to live next-door to somebody I could hear rigorously indulging in this type of behavior. But if I were single & childless, I would find it more amusing than disturbing, providing that the rent was cheap enough. That’s why my friends don’t care about the dude screaming next door, or if said screaming (that hopefully you are still listening to) may or may not be caused by having objects shoved in his ass. The rent’s cheap. All’s good.

Chris Bopst has been a fixture on the Richmond music scene for over two decades, playing in GWAR, the Alter Natives, and The Holy Rollers, among other bands. His free-form radio show, The Bopst Show, has existed for over a decade, appearing on multiple Richmond AM radio stations before becoming an internet podcast in 2008. Weekly episodes of the podcast can be found at rvanews.com.

Growing up on the southern tip of Florida, Rocky discovered a love for skateboarding at the age of 12, which became a common thread he shared with just a few people living in the Florida Keys. The music and art he was introduced to through the skateboarding culture made a profound impact on his life and to this day continue to influence him as a person and as an artist. Heavily influenced by the punk and hardcore scene in Miami, Rocky taught himself how to screen print in the mid to late 90's so he could make his own shirts and patches. The natural progression was to start making his own artwork using the silkscreen methods he had learned. Since 2001 he has shown work all across the US including live silkscreen exhibitions in LA, NY, Las Vegas and Miami and has been featured in various publications such as Swindle and Juxtapose Magazine.

Check out what Rocky is up to here.

If you like electronic music than tonight in Richmond might be the one time where you cannot go wrong.

UPDATE : PRETTY LIGHTS IS OPENING FOR BASSNECTAR AT THE HAT FACTORY and VICE VERSA!! 2NITE! Has this ever been done?

PRETTY LIGHTS has sold out The National several times already with his tightly produced dance trax that bring elements of hip hop, club, jazzy and electro together in one great head bobbin set. The new album is dope and you can download it HERE to get a flavor of what tonight will bring.

BASSNECTAR has come out of the Burning Man desert to descend on Hat Factory with his super popular brand of dubstep. If you are more into the electronic music being played outside the club and looooove BASS! then you need to make the pilgrimage to be at this show and pay your respects.

Opening for BASSNECTAR is BEATS ANTIQUE and their brand electro-gypsy-world music that we at the office have been playing on repeat the last few days. Great for bringing a lady friend and dancing to. IF you need more incentive, their music is accompanied by beautiful bellydancing - check the video above.

Seriously, it a good day to be a Richmonder (and a gansta) as you can not go wrong with either of these shows.

For more info click HERE

Our friend (my cousin) Mauricio Patarroyo, aka Mau aka Mo Patas, has slowly built a series of painting that have truly stood out on their own, making his mark as one of Richmond’s outstanding portrait artists. With his signiture characature style he’s done a range of friends, celebs, and even a panda, keeping consistent with his attentive linework and canvas size. Given an illustrous simplicity, the images tell an open ended story through the characters with a minimal pallete, leaving much for the viewer to reconsider as they admire it on a friends wall. Love you cuz, keep up the good work. Check out more work at his website and if in Richmond, swing by his opening at Steady Sounds on First Friday in December. via TheBlaaahg

After our post on 3-D painter Alexa Meade, our girl Alyssa sent us this LINK to more optical illusion paintings using real human beings. Artists Laura Spector and Chadwick Gray have been recreating paintings on to their human subjects since 1994. If you glance over it you really cant tell there is a person in there. Pretty amazing.

Here are a few examples and more information can be found HERE.

For reasons you will soon learn, I've been listening to a lot of Suppression lately. Their original Roanoke incarnation were one of the best power-violence bands of the 90s, and that is proved by this multi-camera footage shot in Rochester NY in 1997. They're playing the songs "Subservient Fuck" and "Blood Of Millions," both of which appeared on their split LP with Cripple Bastards. Be prepared for noise, feedback, speed, brutal riffs and plenty of crowd-baiting stage banter from Jason Hodges. This is the shit.

A combination of eastern European mysticism, supreme illustration skills, futuristic graphic sensibilities and enough business savvy to work with the biggest companies, Krysztof Domardzi and his STUDIO KXX are one of the most sought after in the world. Love his work from top to bottom and wanted to share.

Check out more of his stuff HERE.

Noah Scalin has a lot going on, from his socially conscious design house ALR Studios, to the nationally recognized Skull-A-Day project - the man is always dabbling in something. His newest endeavor is called The League Of Space Pirates and it is a blend of everything that he is interested in - music, design, sci-fi and yes, skulls. You can find more information on it HERE and check the videos below.

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In the not so distant future, a single corporation controls the entire universe and only one group dares to oppose them: LEAGUE OF SPACE PIRATES! Now you can join their crusade to bring Rock and Roll and justice to all the universe.

From the twisted mind of Noah Scalin, creator of the Internet sensation Skull-A-Day (www.SkullADay.com), comes a new history of the future, in the form of a band of badass anti-corporate space pirates who fight The Man while Kicking out The Jams!

THE LEAGUE OF SPACE PIRATES, led by the inimitable Captain Orlok and featuring the mysterious Ceasar Grot on electronics, has created a one-two punch with their first release, Hypertrophy. This digital EP includes four brand new songs by the THE LEAGUE OF SPACE PIRATES, which run the gamut from Depeche Mode style dance floor stompers to dark tinged hard rocking tracks in the vein of Nine Inch Nails. But The League don’t resort to space clichés and pirate shanties, they play rock songs from the future, done right.

About Noah Scalin - http://www.NoahScalin.com
Noah Scalin is a Richmond, Virginia based artist & designer. He is the creator of the Webby Award winning art project Skull-A-Day which was the basis of his first book, Skulls. Noah’s art has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally including the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago. Noah runs the socially conscious design & consulting firm Another Limited Rebellion, which he founded in 2001 and is also an adjunct faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University. His new book, 365: A Daily Creativity Journal will be published in December.

There are 2 shows hanging right now that are worth checking out.

Richmond native Matt Lively is in Farmville's J. Fergeson Gallery with his latest Ignoring the Roar of Doom. His collection of cute human-animals make for a funny twist on the title as they are oblivious to the impending death and destruction that is about to come. An accomplished commercial artist, Matt Lively has been on the Richmond scene for years with his often-time fluffy idea of the modern world. You can find more info on this show at www.jfergesongallery.com.

Bruce Adam's very large paintings from Drawing Blood III: Tattooed Women were impressive to see up close last First Friday. Robust brush strokes and an honest portrayal of these ladies and their skin art are to be enjoyed on big canvases -these web images don't do them justice. If you are downtown the next couple of weeks, you should make it a point to stop in. I could explain the idea behind the show but the work and the title speaks for itself. More art and tattoo art at www.ghostprintgallery.com

Richmond's own Dominion Skateboards is one of 20 shops chosen nationwide to participate in the Neff East Vs West Shop Video Contest. Each week two videos will be shown and votes are cast for what you think is the better of the two. Dominion is off to a good start with almost 800 votes in the first day. The contest runs for six weeks when the winner will be announced on December 15th. Help support Richmond skateboarding by casting your vote for Dominion Skateboards here.

Dominion Skateboards Video Submission

Photo: Dominion Team Rider Ty Beall, Credit: Brent O'Donnell

A.D.E.N. and Mr. Mason Jones, with E*Klipse The Champloo, Cain McCoy, Bizniz, Isaiah & Hovey, The Dakotas
October 28 at Strange Matter

Leaving work a miraculous fifteen minutes before kitchen closing, I ran one quarter of a city block with a quickness. Much to my surprise, I was able to catch this show in its entirety. I arrived into a thick cloud of anthemic sound bouncing off of graffiti colored walls. Cain McCoy was center stage on the microphone welcoming the crowd. In the call and response format of traditional live rap entertainment, he was asking the crowd to put their hands up, which most of them were happy to do. Then he asked them to do whatever and “just stand there” or “look bewildered.” This was the moment in the night that I knew I was going to enjoy myself. Behind Cain, a live painting was developing. To the left, Mason Jones and ADEN stood crouched over turntables and laptops hitting the crowd in the face with the deafening womp womp of dub step, and its ominously slow, steady kick and snare. There’s a sort of euphoria specifically reserved by grooves like this. They grind away at you until they take control of the nervous system and hit bone. The bass tones help too.

Cain McCoy, the host for the evening, warmed up the entire building and then delivered a brief set. Really, it was way too short. This guy can rap. And on top of that, he commands attention. It’s good to hear someone end a line with “Virginia, baby!” and mean it. It’s also good to hear pensive lyrics, cleverly syncopated to heavy hitting production and enunciated clearly, in emotive tones. This guy does both.

I should admit that I had been looking forward to seeing Cain ever since I realized he was one half of the no longer active rap group The Scholars. His solo performance had every ounce of energy that I remembered the duo carrying on the floor of Nara when I saw them a couple of years ago. Then, I had seen the Scholars deliver an even dosage of backpacker thinking man’s rap and loose-letting party music. Cain still seems to accomplish the same by himself, and with the urgency of a one-man message, it is doubly impressive.

More or less, the same could be said for the following acts. The second performance consisted of a principle emcee named E*klipse the Champloo and some backup that didn’t make sense. I liked his vocal style immensely, but it seemed too loud, or rather, the beat seemed too weak. At a certain point in his set I came to the conclusion that all this guy needs to be a great live performer is some better production. There is nothing more anticlimactic than a good rap song with a club beat wobbling unconvincingly through the PA system. The set was not dragged down by this fact much, and not all the beats were club. Funky horns gave some a Chicago sound, a la Lupe Fiasco with big city charm; others felt like the South and were properly wild. A floor full of people stood enjoying it. Some people were dressed up in early Halloween costumes. Some danced while others blew bubble gum and swayed.

Sets shifted quickly from Eklipse to Bizniz, who continued in good fashion. This dude has charisma that starts with his smile and carries down into the delivery of each one of his words. He is a tall lanky frame, dancing across stage and holding a microphone with great ease. His lyrics said it plainly: You can relax, but if you want to know, Bizniz can tell you where the party’s at. I am paraphrasing but that was more or less it. At several points in his set I heard him mention cookie cutters. I got curious and I found out later that it’s in fact a capitalized Cookie Cutters, the name of his crew or band. I was interested to know more about this, but as it happens from time to time, it was too loud inside Strange Matter for my ears to understand the entirety of this new information.

For me, these first three performances were the highlights of the evening and stood in contrast to the next. The night moved from some really good rap music to an onslaught of R n B that I was not ready for. I guess the crowd was. A large pocket of Isaiah and Hovey fans opened up on the floor. Dancing ensued. People knew lyrics. Did everyone come to see these guys? I didn’t get it. I was confused because of how much I had been enjoying the show until this point. This is not to say that they were horrible; they just weren’t for me. They had entertaining song titles like “I really enjoy those ladies” and lyrics about going to VCU and drinking PBR in the RVA. Their last song, which contained more rap and less singing, had some of the intensity of earlier performances. They mentioned that this was a new song and I selfishly hope that they will continue about in this direction if I am to see them again in the future.

The next act sort of lost it for me and, I think, for the rest of everybody there too. The Dakotas risked two acoustic guitars at the pinnacle of the night’s volume, and half of the crowd dissipated as they played their songs, which were awkwardly dressed in cheesy lyrics. Imagine Eve6 or John Mayer rapping. I’m not sure if the crowd’s departure was a consequence of this dreadfully dull music, but it made sense to assume so at the time. It is just as likely that half of the crowd had been there for the act before them and was going to leave anyway. Speculation is pointless.

For those of us that stuck around, we got to see Mr. Mason Jones and ADEN finish the night with a compelling set of dubstep and crunchy electronic beats. Again, the bass helps massively. These guys have been at it long enough to know what to play and when. Although I could not bring myself to participate, I watched people dance for a bit. I decided I’d feel creepy if I did attempt to dance and, before heading home for sleep, I made sure to lose a quarter getting stomped in an amazing arcade game called Puzzle Fighter.

I have good information that suggests Cain McCoy is organizing another show coming up soon at Strange Matter. It’s called Illogical Activities and scheduled to go down on Saturday November 13th. If it’s anything like Mind over Strange Matter, it should be a good time.

That magazine that people always compare RVA to (for what reason is beyond me, but anyway) has an article in its latest issue about our fair city, headlined by that striking image at the top of this article. It kind of nails the spirit of this place, the way we all like the easy living and constant parties, but also strongly implies that it means we don't have ambition. I take strong exception to sentences like: "If you’re moving there, you obviously have given up on being noticed in your career," and "We could not possibly imagine a worse fate than if the rest of the world actually cared what happened here." (Sentences like that may also explain why the article features no byline.) But hey, if people think we're all having the time of our lives in this city, we must be doing something right.

Read the article for yourself and form your own opinion.

(publisher note: We already knew about this last year but our editor Necci hadn't til today.)

You might have seen him of the TV show (Letterman anyone?). You might have heard him on the radio. You might have seen his YouTube videos. He is everywhere but finally landing at the Camel Sunday, November 28 and bringing his pop-infused, folk music with him.

But we might be MORE excited about his special guest Julia Nunes. Have you seen her play the ukulele? This girl is amazing! Check it.

Check the FACEBOOK PAGE for more details OR you can buy your tix right now ---> HERE.