Party: Sabertooth Micro Fest - Day 1

Party: Sabertooth Micro Fest - Day 1

Sabertooth website:
http://www.sabertoothpdx.com/

3-Day Pass Tickets: http://bit.ly/Sabertooth3DayPass

Friday, February 5

McMenamins and Portland Mercury present
"Sabertooth Micro Fest" - Day 1
featuring:
Super Furry Animals
Earth
King Black Acid
Al's Den: Chris Couch (World's Finest)
A musical celebration of the Crystal Ballroom's psychedelic history
sponsored by Portland Mercury, Sizzle Pie, Jackpot Records and VooDoo Doughnuts
7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show
All ages welcome
$30 advance, $35 day of show
"Sabertooth Micro Fest" - Day 1
McMenamins And Portland Mercury is excited to announce the full lineup for the Crystal Ballroom's 2nd Annual Sabertooth psychedelicstonerrockmicrofest, a property-wide musical celebration of the Crystal Ballroom's psychedelic history.

Click here for the listing for all three days!

3 Day Passes and VIP tickets available!

Super Furry Animals

A brief history of SFA

"People say music is going to change the world but it can only be soundtrack. We wouldn't cause a revolution but it would be good background music" - Gruff Rhys

The most creative of the contemporary Welsh bands, SFA consistently blend classic songwriting with often breathtaking experimentation.

Causing a quiet revolution can't be easy, but SFA have all but managed it without ever breaking through to the musical mainstream. And since their formation in the early 90s, the Super Furry legend has become something of a cliché: the blue techno tank, the 40ft inflatable bears, the record-breaking debut release, the song with that title. But that's doing lazy justice to their undoubted genius, for they're simply one of the most exciting and innovative groups to have ever emerged in Wales.

The various members of SFA all played in Welsh-language groups prior to forming, and came together as a mainly instrumental group in 1993 in Cardiff, playing around Wales and at celtic festivals in Europe.

In 1995 SFA released two largely experimental EPs for the Cardiff-based Ankst label - including Llanfairpwllgwyngyll- gogerychwyndrobwllantysiliogogogochynygofod (In Space), which was titled in a vain attempt to get into the Guinness Book Of Records.

After the release of its follow-up, Moog Droog (which featured a raw version of live favourite God! Show Me Magic), they signed to Creation records. Offering them a deal after a gig, Alan McGee reportedly requested that they sing more songs in English - to be told that every song in that night's set had been.

This was no accident: sometime around the release of Moog Droog they had made the decision to move towards the mass market. As singer Gruff Rhys later said, "Between us we'd released about six or seven albums in various bands in the Welsh language. So we formed an English language band to make accessible music. We put out English language albums because we've got ambition and we thought it was potentially easier for an international audience."

The band stayed on Creation until the label's collapse in early 2000, and released the albums Fuzzy Logic (1996), Radiator (1997), the b-sides and rarities collection Out Spaced (1998) and Guerrilla (1999).

Fuzzy Logic was the first album Gruff had sung in English - he later remarked that it sounded like a seemingly random collection of accents - and was the first SFA recording with a decent budget behind it.

Some controversy came for the band at the end of 1996, when The Man Don't Give A F**k became an unlikely entrant in the Christmas singles chart. Originally intended to be a b-side, it was put back after problems clearing a Steely Dan sample. When it did appear, The Man was deleted on its day of release, and quickly became a collector's item.

In 1999, the band planned a shamelessly pop assault on the charts. However, the calypso rock of Northern Lites and the sentimental balladry of Fire In My Heart didn't strike much of a chord with record buyers, and the album Guerrilla wasn't a great commercial success.

Its follow-up, Mwng, came out the following summer, and was recorded on 'pop strike'. According to Gruff, "we thought if our English language pop songs aren't getting played on the radio, which was the whole point of Guerrilla, we might as well make Welsh language pop songs that didn't get played on the radio. I suppose it's our attempt at direct action."

Despite being predominantly acoustic, slow and brooding, and entirely in Welsh, Mwng was a surprise hit, and became the biggest-selling Welsh-language album of all time (until Bryn Terfel released a Christmas album later that year).

In July 2001 SFA made a little more history by simultaneously releasing the album and DVD Rings Around The World. The DVD was mixed in 5.1 surround sound, and contained films accompanying each track. As Gruff says, "It was originally going to be a state of the planet concept album, but we decided not to do that in the end. It's about Earth, and the pollution of space, it's about debris. Musically this record covers a lot of ground."

A new album, Phantom Power, was released in July 2003, and was again accompanied by another DVD with surround sound. And in October 2004, the band's first best-of collection, Songbook, was released. It collated all the band's singles from the Llanfair PG EP through to Hello Sunshine, and is an essential first purchase for anyone discovering this wonderful band.

August 2005 saw them release their seventh studio album Love Kraft, which was experimental with all the band contributing and performing lead vocals on various of tracks.

Hey Venus! was launched in August 2007 and saw a return to the 'poppier' tones of their 1996 debut album Fuzzy



Website:
http://www.superfurry.com/
Earth

Earth is an American musical group based in Seattle, Washington, formed in 1990 and led by guitarist Dylan Carlson. Earth's music is mostly instrumental, and can be divided into two distinct stages. Their early work grew out of the Seattle-area grunge scene and is recognized as pioneering the genre of drone doom - an experimental offshoot of doom metal, characterized by droning, minimalist, lengthy, and repetitive structures. Earth's early albums were usually recorded as a duo (Carlson and a bass guitarist), and could be seen as a variation of the experimental doom-influenced metal of The Melvins. Earth currently features a markedly different sound, slow-paced and lengthy, but now with a drummer and featuring strong elements of country music and jazz. Dylan Carlson founded the band in 1990 along with Slim Moon and Greg Babior. Carlson has remained the core of the band's line-up throughout its changes. Current players have included: Adrienne Davies on drums, Lori Goldston on Cello, Karl Blau on bass, Steve Moore on keys and Don McGreevey on bass.

King Black Acid

Daniel Riddle started recording under the name King Black Acid in the late 1980's from his bedroom studio in the San Francisco bay area. He then started playing out live with his first line up called King Black Acid and the Wombstar Orchestra. Featuring keyboardist Melinda DiCillo, guitarist Roger Campos(Papillon), and Bassist Nathan Jorg (SnowBud), the band quickly gained a large audience with their spacey live show and dreamy sound-- self dubbed "coma-core". After adding drummer Scott Adamo (ex Wipers) and percussionist Joseph Trump (ex Pig Face, Elliott Sharp's Carbon), the band recorded their debut album titled "Womb Star Session" (1995). The album was recorded live during a radio station broadcast, capturing some of the lush sound and epic delivery the band was becoming known for. Their sophomore release "Sunlit" was recorded in early 1996 and helped bring the band super-cult like status on an international level, as well as starting the group off on a career of sound track work. "Royal Subjects" was the bands next album, released in 1998; recorded as a soundtrack for an independent film. The group collaged a mix of songs and soundscapes, exploring new territory in arrangement and instrumentation. This was King Black Acid's first attempt recording sounds to movies. For his next project Riddle put together a new band with a new batch of songs. With Scott Adamo(drums), Sarah Mayfield (guitars), Bobeck (bass), Pete Ficht (keyboards), and eventually Sean Farrell (keyboards) joining Riddle to form King Black Acid and the Starseed Transmission. It was this incarnation of KBA that would result in the full length album, "Loves A Long Song", released in October 2000. The album was released to excellent reviews and high ranking numbers in the college radio charts. Finally, the industry and the fans had a record with a more distilled songwriting style that worked well with both radio, film and television, as well as with the hard-core audiophiles. In 2002, Riddle introduced King Black Acid and the 144,000 Member Acid Army, consisting of Sarah Mayfield, Sean Farrell, Joe Trump, bassist Sean Tichner, and keyboardist Rich Landar. This particular line-up was assembled to perform on stage the songs Riddle wrote and recorded for the motion picture soundtrack of The Mothman Prophecies. During this time, Riddle also wrote, recorded, produced and performed with James Angell's Private Player--featuring John Taylor of Duran Duran on bass, Tony Lash of Heatmiser/ Elliott Smith on drums, Sean T guitar and Kevy Kozad on keys. In 2008 Riddle started collaborating with longtime friend and fellow musician Jeffery Trapp (ex Everclear) and formed a powerful new line-up with King Black Acid and the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart was bringing with it an explosive new sound and style. Shedding most of the atmospherics and languid arrangements of the past for a more anthemic and 'sexy' sound. Live show reviews were quoted to say "King Black Acid and the Sacred Heart is heavy like a Chevy and has more hooks than a fucking pirate convention." In 2009 King Black Acid released the song "Let's Burn" on the UnderWorld III Rise Of The Lycans soundtrack. Daniel Riddle is currently writing and recording in his home studio known as the Mazinga Laboratory (KBA Labs) where he is working on new King Black Acid recordings as well as writing, recording and producing other artists. King Black Acid's music has been heard in such films, TV shows, and soundtracks as CSI Miami, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Mothman Prophecies, UnderWorld III, MTV's Real World/Road Rules, Dream with the Fishes, Highway, Witchblade, The Maker, Do Me a Favor and many more. King Black Acid’s music has appeared in advertisements for Nike, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Portland Trail Blazers, CNN Sports, Coca Cola, Virgin Mobile and Reebok.

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/King-Black-Acid-20552349650/timeline/
A musical celebration of the Crystal Ballroom's psychedelic history

The Saber-toothed Cat thrived from the Eocene Epoch to the Pleistocene Epoch (a 42 million year stretch), and it's our hope that our Sabertooth Festival, with its roots in Portland's own "psycheluvic epoch"* will survive as long.

While psychedelic music covers a range of styles and genres, it is inspired by psychedelic culture and the attempt to replicate the mind altering experiences that started in mid-'60s folk rock and blues. As such, Sabertooth celebrates the historical role the Crystal Ballroom played through previous half-century of psychedelic music.

In the late 1960s the Crystal Ballroom celebrated an era referred to as "18 months of Psychedelia," and hosted mind expanding artists of the day from Frank Zappa to the Grateful Dead. While the modern Sabertooth Festival celebrates this history and shares the same common thread of experimentation and the ability to transport the listener to an altered reality, it is not a rehash of artists from a bygone era; the psychedelic music of the 21st century is in fact very different than what it was in the 1960s.

The Crystal's psychedelic cred includes notable nuggets from rock and roll history:

the famous Peace Rites event at the Crystal in the '60s, where Allen Ginsberg disputably first read 'Howl' (we celebrate his fellow beats in the Joe Cotter mural in the room itself).
the Dead recorded much of their exploratory Anthem of the Sun at the Crystal
the forefather of the distorted and processed guitar, Jimi Hendrix, played there as well
The Crystal has always been the nexus of this scene and McMenamins has continued to program and promote music of this nature since its opening.

Those looking at psychedelia's earliest roots will also see the Crystal playing a role. The first use of the word "psychedelic" in reference to music was in reference to our friends and extended family, the Holy Modal Rounders (members of whom will be performing at the Sabertooth event) of the East Village Freak Folk scene. Other key players of this scene were John Fahey, who's last Portland show was with us at our St Johns Pub; Bert Jansch (Pentangle) who we have hosted on two occasions in Lola's Room and the Rounders themselves who have performed multiple reunion concerts at the Crystal Ballroom.

In the late 70s the new psychedelic revival featuring bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, George Clinton and Fishbone... all acts who have played the Ballroom. And as time moved on, the early 90s brought a "neo-psychedelic " movement with the Elephant 6 collective, and the Crystal continues to host their music (Jeff Mangum, Neutral Milk Hotel, of Montreal - and supporting the Saturday night show The Minders).

The 21st Century lineage continues with such bands as Tame Impala, Animal Collective and The War on Drugs, who in fact just performed at the Crystal and whose early member/collaborator Kurt Vile headlines the February 7 event.

When psychedelic music melded with doom metal and evolved into Stoner Rock, Sleep was the first band of that kind and headlinine the first night of the festival.

Psychedelic music in its varying forms and styles is part of the lifeblood of the Crystal Ballroom: we wouldn't be open today without it, and we have continued to program it. Sabertooth is a natural extension of this, a full blown celebration of the music where the Company and the Crystal , as our predecessors , eternally presses Furthur ...

*from the Oregonian, March 3, 1967

Wiki-Delia:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_music

Interesting Related Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Remember-the-Crystal-Ballroom-of-the-60s/1429127164040565