Back in 2008, we teamed up with Viva
Radio to follow the indie elite to and from Austin, TX. It might be a full two years later, but we're thrilled to finally let everyone in on this.
The titillating findings were compiled into a few things: a lovely poster, in which anecdotes have been stored, a digital album featuring 25+ bands from the underground vanguard, so that you can hear what we heard, and a commemorative t-shirt: All of which you can purchase now (all proceeds from the sales go to Make The Road NY).
Over the next couple of weeks
we're running a journal of the events that transpired as seen and heard
through the eyes and ears of the loyal Impose and Viva Radio crew
that courageously went where no other web sites have gone before.Here is how our story begins…
Market Hotel, Brooklyn, NY, March 1, 2008
The Market Hotel is a broad, high-ceilinged wedge of re-purposed architecture driven into the shifting face of Bushwick. One mirrored back corner, pushing up against coat check and
occasional bar, began the night in a fittingly unpredictable fashion:
twanging, electronically rhythmic blues-rock, voices echoed and
French-accented, from touring visitors Cheveu, following a magnetic set from Baltimore post-hardcore typographers Double Dagger. In launching our voyage, Market looked bright-eyed ahead to other such
lavishly makeshift residence-venues we were soon to encounter; the
bands filling its space with ecstatic sound that night — an impressive
six of them — would form a blueprint and map for the travels that
followed.
Later, the same corner hosted Shooting Spires, an off-shoot of the same
we would follow through our next two stops. The other corner of the
wedge's base sports a set of gym class-style bleacher seats which, that
night, provided vantage on
The point of the wedge, driven into a prominent intersection at the
edge of the one-time Town of Woods, contained the Hotel's trapezoidal
main stage, all but tipping Baltimore prog-spazzers Ponytail into the waving arms of the audience. Digitally refined Philly metalheads Genghis Tron,
later to join us again in St. Louis, put the back wall to good use
displaying a row of brilliant vertical lights. Weeks later, upon our
return, the same space would close the journey, yielding recordings of Knyfe Hyts and Dan Deacon.
