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THE flagpole GUIDE TO
SLINGSHOT 2016
By Music Staff music@flagpole.com
always, there are plenty of
performances to choose
from when planning
your Slingshot Festival, which returns this
Thursday-Saturday with a full schedule of
music, art, comedy and more. The event,
which has steadily grown bigger and better
since its inception, boasts a tremendous
music lineup for its fourth annual edition,
including Bay Area rap icon Lil B, electro
punk project Crystal Castles, post-rock
heroes Maserati and many others.
To help cut through the noise, we’ve
picked some of our must-see Slingshot
performers, listed below in order of their
appearance. The full festival schedule can be
found in the Flagpole Calendar and at sling-
shotathens.com, where you can also find
info on tickets, updated set times and more.
Bombino
Thursday, 10 p.m., Georgia Theatre
Omara Moctar, known as Bombino, is a
self-described “Tuareggae” musician from
Agadez, Niger. Bombino garnered national
attention with his album Nomad, which
landed on Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Albums
of 2013 list, where it was highlighted for
the musician’s impressive guitar technique.
Adding to Bombino’s authenticity, all of his
songs are sung in the native Tuareg lan
guage of Tamasheq.
After the initial success of 2011’s Agadez
and 2013’s Nomad, Bombino toured the
United States and performed at festivals
such as Bonnaroo for a growing fanbase.
Now, Bombino has another album on the
brink. Azel, produced by Dirty Projectors
vocalist Dave Longstreth, is his highly
anticipated sixth studio album. A single,
“Inar,” was released in January, and if it’s
any indication, expect an album of Saharan
groove-rock with Tuareg roots shining
through. [Maria Lewczyk]
Japan Nite
Friday, Caledonia Lounge
The openers for this year’s Japan Nite
may be among the most compelling acts to
perform all weekend. The show stealer is
relentless Brooklyn-based duo Toranavox.
Japanese guitarist Ken Minami, of similar
sounding two-piece Ken South Rock, splits
vocal duties with Israeli drummer Eli Half!.
The pair have a clear fascination with the
American hard rock and metal sounds
that have resonated with Japanese youth
for decades. Minami and HalfTs Japanese,
Hebrew and English lyrics add a true inter
national flavor to the duo’s treatment of
time-tested sounds.
After Toranavox melts proverbial faces,
the fun-loving Otonana Trio will lighten
the mood with its homages to P-Funk and
Les Claypool wackiness. Don’t let the trio’s
lightheartedness or obsession with ramen
noodles fool you; the band consists of vet
eran players led by former jazz guitarist
Kentaro Saito.
Headliners Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re will turn
the volume back up without sapping the
fun out of the room. The all-woman garage
trio’s ferocity matches that of Toranavox,
plus an ample dose of kawaii. Overall, it’s
a stacked bill matching an upstart hard
rock duo with two capable acts with ties
to Japan’s equally varied contributions to
indie rock. [Bobby Moore]
Julianna Barwick
Friday, 8 p.m., Georgia Theatre
Julianna Barwick’s voice traipses with
the same measured mellowness in an inter
view as it does in the mantric layers of her
music: She’s pretty laid back. But Barwick
says she’s not trying to mellow anybody
out, only that she’s fairly mellow herself. “I
don’t have any intentions for how the music
can be used,” she says. “I get emails from
yoga teachers and people who like to medi
tate. I get it. For the most part, it’s dreamy,
chill, sometimes cyclical music to listen to.”
Barwick’s music has an Escherian qual
ity to it, seeming at once to swell and wend
but never get any bigger or go anywhere.
It meditates, hovers like a fog. Her music
is neither about the destination nor the
journey, but rather wherever one happens
to be at a given instant. Each song bears
an evocative stillness, like a single frame
extracted from a film, demanding dissection
and contemplation, a fraction of a second
stretched thousands of times over so every
last speck can be examined.
As with previous records, Barwick com
posed her newest, Will, on the fly, entering
recording spaces with nothing but a caffeine
high, improvising each song from scratch. It
gives her music a certain presentness, and
her live show is a bit more planned to retain
that sense of exigency. “It takes a little bit
of mapping out,” she says. “I have to teach
myself how to play it live and build up the
loops and not have it be 18 minutes long
per song.”
Barwick recorded Will in upstate New
York; Asheville, NC; Lisbon; and her home
in Brooklyn. Will has a more prominent
instrumental component than her vocal-
heavy earlier work, but her voice—honed
in church and school choirs growing up,
buttressed with high school vocal lessons
and a stint in an opera chorus after gradu
ating—is still front and center.
Will’s ethereal loops invoke a religious
sense of the infinite, but by virtue of how
and where Barwick made it, the album still
feels homemade in its essence, and thus
intimate and cozy. It’s a difficult balance to
strike. “I think that comes from using a lot
of reverb, on vocals in particular,” Barwick
says. “Artificially creating a space. Once
you start layering those sounds on top of
each other, it’s going to be very big.” [Adam
Clair]
Lil B
Friday, 11 p.m., Georgia Theatre
Referred to as The BasedGod by his
hardcore devotees, Brandon McCartney
has built a legendary reputation for his off-
the-wall personality and cultlike fan base.
McCartney practices a “based” lifestyle,
emphasizing the notion of spreading posi
tivity and love towards everyone. The idea
has made him a star in the world of music,
sports, books and social media. Ahead of
his Slingshot performance, here’s a deeper
look at the many career paths of the man
most know as Lil B.
SLINGSHOT COMEDY NIGHT
SATURDAY, 7:30 P.M., 40 WATT CLUB
Interviews with comedians are tricky—especially comedians like Moshe Kasher.
Kasher is extremely sarcastic, which basically means his jokes (about, say, never
bombing once in his entire career, or waiting for the expiration of his contract with
the Zionist cabal that controls the world’s
entertainment industry so he can scale S
back the Jewishness of his act) don’t 5
translate well to print. A veteran of count- £
less interviews, Kasher knows this, but he i
can’t turn off the defense mechanism. r_
“Every comedian has had the experi
ence of a person latching onto very weird,
sincere themes, where you sound like,
‘I’m a self-important, overly serious, sac
charine kind of asshole,”’ Kasher says.
“You just pepper these little jokes in, in
the desperate hope that your interview
will come off like, ‘This guy knows how to
have a good time in an interview.’”
So, without dwelling on specifics, take it from this writer: Kasher actually seems
like he knows how to have a good time. In interviews, most comedians tend to either
refuse to make jokes, lest they spoil their act or see their humor lost in translation
to print, or force prepared and print-tested answers, regardless of whether they
address the question asked. But Kasher is off-the-cuff funny in a way few comedi
ans are.
At Slingshot, Kasher is performing with Nate Bargatze, whose sparklingly clean
act is a stark contrast to Kasher’s blue-as-the-deep-sea routine, reflecting their
divergent backgrounds. Kasher’s act touches on his upbringing, split between
Brooklyn with his Hasidic father and Oakland, CA with his atheist hippie mom, as
opposed to Bargatze’s, which Kasher describes as an “articulated defense of the
Tennessean in him.”
The bill at Slingshot’s Comedy Night also includes Luke Fields and Caleb Synan,
who both have Athens ties, and Atlanta’s Cherith Fuller. [Adam Clair]
12 FLAGPOLE.COM • MARCH 30, 2016
RON WYMAN