This past Saturday was the second edition of Berlin’s Gegen party at M.I.K.Z. Club, including DJs Olof Dreijer of The Knife and Mt. Sims, plus a second room for experimental music and live performances from Mater Suspiria Vision and Butterclock. In keeping with the party’s theme (“gegen” is German for “against”), I decided to cause a bit of a stir by approaching bearded bears with a pair of scissors and an edition of ten “Bartbeschneidungsbescheinigungen” (“Beard circumcision certificates”). I was happy to find a few good sports – including co-organizers/DJs Warbear and Tom Ass — who let me take a small symbolic snip of their facial foliage, and Verena of Transnational Queer Underground was there to photographically document my victims and my dumbass smirk.
“…while there’s nothing inherently wrong with facial hair, beards have become a tired cliché in the “alternative” gay scene, a gesture often signifying little more than conforming to nonconformity, a superficial expression of masculinity in an attempt to compensate for personal insecurity. Plus, food gets stuck in there.”
Last year singer Seth Bogart (aka Hunx) completely reinvented his band Hunx and his Punx and turned it into a pretty glamorous four-girls-one-fag-group. In autumn the new “girl group”, consisting of Bogard, Shannon Shaw (bass / vocals), Michelle Santamaria (guitar), Erin Emslie (drums) and Amy Blaustein (guitar/organ), released a new single called “Too Young To Be In Love” (see video below). Now the band has finished the production of a new album with the same title, which will be released on March 29 via Hardly Art. The release is followed by an extensive tour throughout the US and Canada in April and May.
Most of the these gigs are are an opportunity to see Shannon Shaw’s band Shannon and the Clams live. The trio, which seems to have the same passion for the wall of sound sound of the 50ies and the garage sound of the 60ies as Bogart releases its second album “Sleep Talk” in April 5 on 1-2-3-4-Go! Records.
Check out “Lover’s Lane”, the opener of the new H&HP album (featuring additional voices by Shannon) and “Sleep Talk”, the title track of the new S&TC album right here, both songs can be downloaded as Free-MP3s. I also posted the pretty trashy / campy clip to S&TCs “Hunk Hunt” and Justin Kelly‘s clip to H&HP’s “Too Young To Be In Love” below the jump.
After my first compilation Another Wave, the second free MP3-sampler released on CATCH FIRE is completely dedicated to True Panther Sounds, a small record label based in San Francisco which is the best proof that beyond the trend to self-promotion there is still an exciting label culture out there. TPS’s music ranges from the rather unconventional indie rock of bands like Girls, Magic Kids or Hunx and his Punx, to the experimental, mostly pretty hypnotic pop of acts such as Glasser, Lemonade or Teenage Fantasy and I guess it’s also worth mentioning here that an above-average level of these bands/acts have (or at least seem to have) a queer background or approach.
Like last time, the compilation is completely free, thanks to the guys of TPS who allowed me to collect my favourite ones of the free songs they’ve been released during the last few months and make a sampler out of them. I hope you like the result as much as I do. Below you find the track list, you can click on the single song links for the original sources of the tracks if you only want to download individual songs. The cover I posted on top of this post and a list of the tracks are included in the download file.
Justin Kelly is an independent film maker who has directed a lot of great music videos for great bands and projects from the queer music scene of the San Francisco Bay Area such as Hunx And His Punks (“Cruising, You Don’t Like Rock’n Roll”), Hey Willpower (“Double Fantasy II”) and the Younger Lovers (“Danny”). I really like the way Kelly manages to put together videos that are so full of good ideas and that are visually so well done that although you see that they where shot without a big budget they just don’t really feel like low-budget-videos. What I didn’t know is that he also made a bunch of short films, I hope that I’ll get the possibility to see them some time. Here are some of his current pices of work works, you find more stuff on his website, his YouTube page, or his Vimeo page (That’s where I found the picture on top). I also added a new Tag called “Justin Kelly” to the Category funcion because I’m pretty sure this is not going to be the last posting showing his work.
On My Life at Night Johnny McGoven aka the Gay Pimp since last year frequently uploads pictures of his nightlife in New York, where he seems to have a pretty good time (see below, thanks for the link, Jonathan!). And if his collection of snapshots of a pretty undressed partying Brian Kenny doesn’t really satisfy your thirst for private snapshots of queer V.I.Ps I can also recommend SORE, a blog started by a whole collective of people and who amongst other stuff share a lot of nice pictures of their private life and the nightlife in L.A. there. Part of the group is Hunx And His Punx singer Seth Bogart who not only frequently appears in the picture collections but also from time to time postes personal stuff like his resolutions for 2010. But let’s get back to NY first:
Still great: “Cruising” by Hunx And His Punx. Learn more about them here.
I’m totally obsessed with this video and the band, that’s why this is the second time I’m posting it here. Learn more about the Younger Lovers here,here and here.
Garage Rock/ early Punk kind of music usually really bores me, but this is weirder, trashier, funnier and also queer. Hunx And His Punx is the band project of Gravy Train!!!-member Seth Bogart. They have alredy released several single records on which Seth sings with his nasally voice, posing slutty and cute on the covers. Their current song “Cruising” which was released in February is about cruising for guys but not really knowing which of them are straight and which are gay. The video is fun I think. And here’s the only article I could find about the band.
