It is that time again – Friday September 5 will see the return of the Annual Ritual of Summoning, a day show during the Hopscotch Music Festival brought to you by Three Lobed Recordings, Smashed Plastic Record Pressing and WXDU-FM. This will rule. We will be, as always, at Kings in downtown Raleigh from noon until 5pm. This is free. The event will be simulcast on WXDU-FM for those local and far who are unable to be in the room to participate and help us levitate the space. Who is being summoned this year? Thanks for asking. In no particular order we have:
BILL NACE (Body/Head) + JOHN MOLONEY (Sunburned Hand of the Man)
Bill Nace Bandcamp | Spotify
John Moloney Apple Music | Instagram
Bill Nace is an artist and musician based in Philadelphia, PA. He has collaborated with an extraordinary range of musicians, including Michael Morley, Graham Lambkin, Matt Krefting, Chris Corsano, Jooklo Duo, chik white, John Truscinski, Thurston Moore, Jake Meginsky, Jessica Rylan, Paul Flaherty, Wally Shoup, Aaron Dilloway, and Kim Gordon, with whom he regularly plays as one half of the duo Body/Head. In 2020 Nace released the critically acclaimed solo record “BOTH” on Drag City. A collaboration with Gordon and Dilloway — “Body/Dilloway/Head” — is out now on Three Lobed Records.
Drummer John Moloney was a founding member of long-running Boston-born experimental/improv freak rock collective Sunburned Hand of the Man, forming in the late ’90s from the ashes of Shit Spangled Banner, his previous band with Sunburned guitarist Robert Thomas. Moloney played on dozens of releases and in countless performances with his main act, often sitting in with other like-minded groups on record or on tour. As the decades went on, Moloney collaborated with a multitude of experimental song sculptors, including Hush Arbors, MV & EE, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Six Organs of Admittance, Gown, and many others. In 2006 he joined on with sprawling freak blues band Howlin’ Rain, only to play on the band’s debut and go on their supporting tour before leaving to continue his ongoing work with Sunburned Hand of the Man. Over the years Moloney had fallen in with the Sonic Youth camp, playing in various incarnations with SY guitarist Thurston Moore and even creating artwork for their 2009 album The Eternal. When Moore launched new band Chelsea Light Moving in 2012, Moloney signed on as drummer. Moore and Moloney also formed the high-energy guitar/drum improv duo Caught on Tape, issuing various small-run releases as well as the black metal-inspired full-length Full Bleed in 2015.
WILLIAM TYLER (Lambchop, Silver Jews) + CLAIRE ROUSAY
William Tyler Website | Bandcamp | Instagram
Claire Rousay Website | Instagram
William Tyler is a Nashville guitarist and composer. He spent years woodshedding and touring with Nashville groups like Lambchop and Silver Jews before breaking away to focus on his own version of instrumental guitar music.
claire rousay is a Canadian-American musician, composer, and artist currently living in Los Angeles. rousay’s work operates in genre-spanning fashion; she is primarily known for composing highly emotive, whisper-quiet musical works that heavily forefront musique concrète and sound design elements like haptic sound and field recordings. These avant garde elements are often paired with strings, piano, and electronic melodies and textures. Her albums in this vein – on celebrated labels like Thrill Jockey and Shelter Press – gained her notoriety in the international ambient and experimental community. rousay remains stylistically mercurial and incorporates generic elements from rock, electronic, hyperpop, noise, folk, free jazz, and more into her compositions. In some ways rousay is always busy making music about music, and too, music about everyday life, about the ordinary. A delicate and deeply timbrel quality is helixed into the musical components of rousay’s work. Quotidian sounds and spoken word elements are woven into melodies that have been temporally manipulated; time is compressed and expanded, chords are frozen in place, instances take eternities, and occurrences flash by with immediacy. Her work investigates styles, forms, times, and experiences. In this way, rousay is a formalist – interested in the material of music and sound, in technique – and yet her work is profoundly emotive and incredibly impressionistic.
OBJECT HOURS
Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook
Object Hours is Nora Rogers (Solar Halos), Jenny Waters (Work Clothes) and Harrison Haynes (Les Savy Fav). We try to keep songs under 25 minutes for your sake.
VERITY DEN
Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Verity Den’s’ self-titled debut album is being released on March 1, 2024. The album was mixed at home by the band’s Casey Proctor and mastered/cut by Greg Obis at Chicago Mastering Services. The album presents a guitar music refracted through clamor and tenderness, static and hiss, drum machine and synth. The lyrics survey themes of current existential exhaustion and impressionistic reflections This is bound with persistent guitar hooks and equally acidic edges. Formed in early 2023, Verity Den consists of NC-via-Bellingham, WA songwriter/engineer Casey Proctor (Haruspex Palace/Holy Sons), longtime journeymen Trevor Reece and Mike Wallace, late of Drag Sounds (NC) and the addition of Reed Benjamin (Calapase, No One Mind) to round out the live unit.
RIBS
Bandcamp | Instagram
The recipe for a RIBS song is simple: start with a rhythm section that couldn’t count its way out of a wet paper bag, then slather on some futuristic George Jetson joint from a guitar player who seems to have forgotten he’s playing guitar, then finish it with heavy hectoring from a minister of information who woke up on the wrong side of the bus station.
You may recognize them from such bands as 300 Dog Night, Audubon Park, Autospkr, Birds Of Avalon, Blues Creature, Calc, Canned Snakes, Dim Delights, Drag Sounds, Dreamless, Enemy Waves, Headkicker, Heads On Sticks, Mutual Hate Society, The Nein, Olympus Mons, Reese McHenry, S.E. Ward, Strange, TZYVYX, Verity Den, and The White Octave.
