Sound Stories & Interviews

Minus the bear brings their invisible trampoline sideshow to Bend.In the four or so years that I've been listening to Minus the Bear, I've always envisioned them as wearing white lab coats, all the time. On stage, in the studio, eating a grilled cheese sandwich - always in the white lab coats.
 
The Seattle band is often considered one of the premiere "experimental" rock bands in the U.S., which is the tag that first caught my attention, and also instilled the lab coat image into my brain. Minus the Bear bassist Cory Murchy doesn't wear a lab coat, or goggles, and, like the other four members of his band, shouldn't be cast as an Emmett Brown-like madman, tweaking massive amplifiers in a cluttered basement laboratory.
"Ultimately, we're just a rock band and making music that we're going to be excited about playing in the next couple of years." Murchy says before a show in Tucson as the band's tour heads west for an appearance at Indio, California's Coachella festival.

Whose ready to get dirty?The word dirtball conjures images of scuzzy gutter dwellers, grease under the fingernails from their day job. Our Dirtball however, is neither scuzzy, nor greasy. This Dirtball is a rhyme-spitting drummer who is more likely to be dusty from a camping trip than anything else. David Alexander, a.k.a. The Dirtball, started playing drums when he was seven and doesn't seem to have stopped since then. A true Central Oregon native, Alexander named his third major label release Crook County.
 
"I wanted to bring it home with this album. Crook County is where I raised hell my whole life. We used to party out there all the time," he said.

Weinland’s magic bus. Adam Shearer, the lead singer and songwriter of Weinland wanted to be just that. A singer/ songwriter. But his songs had a different idea.
 
"I really love acoustic music and adding every layer took a lot of thought for me," Shearer said. "For example, I was sure we weren't gonna have drums and then we ended up adding them. The band wanted to fill out the sound. I was the only one dragging my feet."
Weinland, who will be playing McMenamins Old St. Francis School in Bend on Wednesday, April 30, started out as a solo acoustic project for Shearer, who at the time, was going by the stage name John Weinland.

the fleet fingers will be out in force at new monsoon. If you're a fan of open-ended electric jams and happened to miss New Monsoon at last year's inaugural 4 Peaks Festival in Tumalo, here's your chance to totally redeem yourself and strike a blow for sustainable living at the same time.
San Francisco's jammin' rock quintet will play a special benefit show for 3E Strategies next week at the Summit Stage and Saloon. New Monsoon has been transforming audiences across the country into dedicated fans with its inventive musical exploration and straight up down home rock-n-roll that is served up on a relentless touring schedule.
The band just released a new album, New Monsoon V, and is a staple on the summer festival circuit, from Bonnaroo to Summerfest, including a stop in Tumalo last year where they headlined the 4 Peaks Music Festival. They can also hold their own on a solo bill, which they proved in January '07, when they played to a sold-out Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Unfortunately the band has a schedule conflict and won't be able to return to 4 Peaks, so fans will have to strike while the iron is hot next week at the Summit.

proper robot technique. Blue Turtle Seduction is about to release a new record called 13 Floors and after drummer Adam Navone describes the idea behind the title, it seems that this album's heading may be the most accurate description of the South Lake Tahoe band that you're likely to stumble upon.
"It's got 13 songs on it. Each song is its own floor of a building; there's payroll, and the mailroom and all this different stuff. One floor is hardware, the next is lingerie, ya know. It's a cool analogy," Navone says.
What Navone is getting at here is that Blue Turtle Seduction is a band that one could spend the better part of a fortnight attempting to classify, and still come out with nothing to show for it but a migraine. I knew of people who were advised to go see "this killer bluegrass band called Blue Turtle Seduction," only to head out for what turned out to be a night of funk-filled rock, left wondering what trunk the aforementioned bluegrass band had been stuffed into. The thing is, however, that BTS can play bluegrass, and they can play it well, but they're not a friggin' bluegrass band, or a rock band, or a funk band, which is something Navone thinks fans up and down BTS' tour trodden West Coast path (Navone is visiting friends in Florida when he calls into the Source, describing his vacation as his "first week off the road since Christmas") are starting to grasp.