Live Like This

Wednesday was a good night for music in Knoxville, from Abigail Washburn wrapping up her residency at Relix to the Discordian Society's rollicking jams at Pres Pub and Liturgy's screeching, pummeling black metal at Pilot Light. Here's a little of what we saw.

The local electro-acoustic/chamber pop ensemble Shortwave Society, just a week away from a headlining show at Pilot Light with Asheville's Stephaniesid, had their van, loaded with a pile of gear worth $25,000, stolen in South Knoxville last night.

It's a bad deal for any band, but it's particularly devastating for these guys, who depend on samples, programmed percussion, and homemade synthesizers to make the music they do. Singer/songwriter Grant Geren says it's "a nightmare" and worries that they'll have to cancel shows for the rest of the year.

Details from Knox Blab:

LARGE, WHITE 15 PASSENGER DODGE RAM 3500 WITH THE WORD "CAUTION" ON THE BACK IN BLACK LETTERS. THE FRONT GRILL AND RIGHT TURN SIGNAL ARE ALMOST COMPLETELY MISSING AND BUMPER IS BENT.

Gear in van: Roland handsonic, v-drum kick trigger, L1 Bose Tower w/ mixer and bass speaker, homemade synthesizer, Vintage Fender Rhodes with stand, Roland space echo peddle, RE-20 dynamic microphone, fender deluxe guitar amp, Line 6 delay modeler, Baggs DI box, yamaha mixing board MG-122X, Mooger Fooger Ring Modulator, Boss digital tuner pedal, Mod Tone tremor pedal, 4 DI Boxes, a pandeiro, a djembe, 18' crash cymbal, gretsch snare drum, Monster Power Conditioner, many stands cables, full box of shortwave Cd's, 50+ shortwave t-shirts.

Just in case you missed him at MoogFest in Asheville last weekend, Gregg Gillis, the Pittsburgh DJ/producer who mixes and matches samples from classic rock and Top 40 and goes by the name Girl Talk, is coming back to Knoxville. He'll be at the Valarium on Jan. 24; ticket details haven't been announced yet. (News about his new album is also expected soon.)

Chris Buckner wrote about Gillis back in 2008.

R.B. Morris has followed a lot of paths during a three-decade career as poet, playwright, and musician. But none of them would have obviously led him to his latest post, which is songwriter-in-residence at the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis.

The Institute is designed to face the "ongoing challenges of maintaining a safe food supply, avoiding economic disruptions caused by emerging infectious diseases, and evaluating methods to better manage the inevitable disease outbreaks that develop due to globalization," which"may best be investigated by integrating modeling and mathematics with the biological studies which are critical to the formulation of public policy to address these challenges." (That's all according to the NIMBioS website.) The songwriter program is intended "to encourage the creation and production of songs involving ideas of modern biology and the lives of scientists who pursue research in biology."

It's a month-long program that will last through June and include up to five songwriters. No word yet on what exactly will be done with the songs that are written.

The Knoxville Horror Film Festival is officially over, but you won't be able to tell this weekend: the same group that organized the fest at Relix Variety Theatre in Happy Holler last weekend is hosting a two-hour recap at the same place on Friday night, Oct. 29, at 7 p.m., followed by a screening of black-metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us, which will in turn be followed by a performance from Knoxville black-metal band Argentinum Astrum.

Lee Gardner reviewed Until the Light Takes Us here.

Admission to either the recap or the UTLTU screening is $5, or it's $8 for both.

Devo has canceled its scheduled performance at MoogFest this weekend after guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh had his right thumb sliced open by a piece of glass, according to a press release from Devo's label.

Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Cassale will still attend the AC Entertainment-organized festival in Asheville to accept the Moog Innovation Award on behalf of the band.

Details after the jump.

The Johnson Swingtet is one of Jack Neely's favorite local bands, as you can tell from his 2008 feature on them. They've changed things up quite a bit since then, so the new CD, which the Swingtet is officially releasing this weekend, will be a welcome introduction to the band's new lineup and its new interest in Western swing.

The Swingtet's celebrating the release of Volume 1 (oddly enough, the follow-up to their 2008 self-titled debut) on Friday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. at the Laurel Theater in Fort Sanders. Admission is $10-$12.

It might be a surprise to their fans, but everybody doesn't like Mumford and Sons, the exceedingly popular young English folk-rock band (think Coldplay meets the Decembrists) that sold out its Nov. 8 show at the Valarium in a matter of days.

The story making the Internet rounds is that Mark E. Smith, the curmudgeonly lead singer and mastermind for British postpunk legends the Fall, revealed his contempt for the band in an interview with Australian mag The Brag. The full interview isn't available online, but the Quietus offered this excerpt, which reveals Smith to be (surprise!) kind of a bastard, but is also pretty funny:

"We were playing a festival in Dublin the other week. There was this other group like, warming up in the next sort of chalet, and they were terrible. I said 'shut them cunts up' and they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them. The bands said 'that's the Sons of Mumford' or something, 'they're number five in charts!' I just thought they were a load of retarded Irish folk singers."

That didn't take long. The same day we ran a story about Maryville cock-rockers Gun*Slinger, we also got an e-mail from the band's management informing us that singer Cole Graham, who founded the band in 2008, has been fired--just in time for the band's show at the Longbranch Saloon tomorrow night. Daniel Ott, whose brother Marcus plays lead guitar in the band, has been named as Graham's replacement.

We reported back in April that the Tim Lee 3 had a busy summer ahead of them, mainly because they would be recording a new album at studios in North Carolina, Arizona, and Mississippi.

They apparently got really busy at those sessions--the new album, Raucous Americanus, the follow-up to the band's 2008 disc Good2b3, is an old-fashioned double album. It's due out next month, and the CD-release show the Lees have planned for Patrick Sullivan's on Friday, Nov. 12, is appropriately big: a premiere of the band's video for the song "Get There First," DJ sets from Nathan Moses and Graham McCorkle of the Vaygues, and an opening set by Angela Faye Martin, a North Carolina singer/songwriter the Lees have befriended since playing a local show with her earlier this year. And, of course, a long set of the Tim Lee 3 playing songs from the new album, and probably some old favorites.