Friday night’s opening house concerts in three locations jammed living rooms and basements for sets by The Soil & The Sun, Lasso, Kellen & Me and more. (Photos, video)
Living Room Throngs: The Soil & The Sun drew a full house, literally, for the opening night of the Lamp Light Music Festival in Eastown. (Photo/Local Spins)
Talk about house concerts on steroids.
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Grand Rapids’ Lamp Light Music Festival flipped the switch on its second year with a set of cozy but powerful performances in several Eastown neighborhood homes on Friday night, with elbow-to-elbow throngs jammed into living rooms and basements for some eclectic musical wizardry.
Kellen & Me in the basement at The House of Pancakes (Photo/Local Spins)
It included the atmospheric, electronic-hued folk of Grand Rapids’ The Soil & The Sun (at The Hen House), the psychedelic twang of Kalamazoo’s Lasso (at The Waffle House), the looped, lo-fi “rock ‘n’ glow” of Chicago’s Kellen & Me (at The House of Pancakes), the alt-rock/pop of Chicago’s Wedding Dress and more, continuing deep into the evening.
The houses were packed so tightly with attentive indie-rock devotees that it was tough to move a muscle: If you had an itch, the fellow next to you probably felt the urge to scratch it.
But that also created a nonpareiled intimate vibe, giving listeners the feeling they were witnessing something truly special, along the lines perhaps of seeing the late Lou Reed with his artsy Velvet Underground in their early years in some out-of-the-way New York club. And this was not a hard-partying, ultra-boisterous crowd, but enthused 20-somethings intensely interested in the boundary-pushing indie music offered up.
HOMEY, UNIQUE AND PASSIONATE PERFORMANCES
As Kellen & Me noted at one point at during his basement set at The House of Pancakes on Sigsbee Street SE, crediting John Hanson and other organizers of this unusual event: “There’s nothing average about this festival. It’s awesome.”
Next door in the basement of The Waffle House, Lasso’s Andy Catlin (who’s also part of several other Double Phelix collective projects) put it this way: “We don’t play this kind of show. It’s awesome for John to ask us to come down.”
Lasso at The Waffle House (Photo/Local Spins)
Awesome, indeed, was the operative word for all of the performances as well, with the featured artists exuding appropriately homey yet passionate presentations of their transfixing material, with concertgoers offered refreshments such as “hot cider pressed this morning” and butternut squash soup.
Check out Local Spins photos and some video highlights from Friday below.
The festival continues in even greater earnest today (Saturday) in five Eastown homes, with a host of workshops and 17 performances by local and regional acts (including Breathe Owl Breathe, The Wallace Collective, Samantha Crain, Frontier Ruckus, Rick Chyme, Cobalt Mexican Wolves and Ghost Heart). It wraps up on Sunday with 10 shows at three of the participating festival houses.
Get the full schedule and more details online at lamplightmusicfestival.com; limited numbers of weekend and day passes may be available at the houses. And check out the Local Spins spotlight on Lamp Light performer Fiona Dickinson here.
— John Sinkevics for Local Spins
LAMP LIGHT MUSIC FESTIVAL: THE LOCAL SPINS PHOTO GALLERY, VIDEO
Email John Sinkevics at jsinkevics@gmail.com.
Copyright 2013, Spins on Music
