Portable Shrines

SPACE d’OM is a meditation environment, a utopian lounge, and constantly evolving multimedia crash pad nestled both inside and outside of a 17′ geodesic dome. We’ve been installing it all week for ONN/OF Festival in Ballard.  You can read more about it here and here, or you can just come experience it for yourself this Saturday and Sunday at the Sweater Factory, 1415 NW 52nd.

The lineup for this year’s Austin Psych Fest has been announced and it looks pretty sweet. Bombino, Moon Duo, High Wolf, Psychic Ills, Woods and Night Beats to name a few. Psych DJ  Al Lover provides an excellent  reverb-drenched mixtape as a preview.  Al Lover’s handcrafted hip-hop/psych rock mixes are all amazing, confounding and highly recommended meditations on rhythm and sound. Have a listen.

1/21/2012 -That band of mystic heathens known as Jeffertitti’s Nile return to Seattle. Their future primitive space garage vibes  were one of the highlights of Escalator Fest 2010 so we look forward to seeing them again but this bill also boasts three of the hands down best local acts going right now- Diminished Men, Rose Windows and the Low Hums. With DJ Mamma Casserole.  See you there…

Stenskogen will be playing the Cafe (un)American New Year’s Eve 2012 party from 9-11pm


A multi-media experience and New Years bacchanal Saturday, December 31, 2011 Washington Hall 153 14th Avenue Seattle, Washington 98122 (14th Ave & Fir St) 9pm – 3am (21+) $100 tickets (limited to 300) complimentary food & drink www.strangertickets.com

“This New Years Eve join State V Pan for Cafe (un)American’s reprisal – an elegant evening of music, magic and mayhem. Join DK Pan and a constellation of debutantes, degenerates, aristocrats and anarchists for an unforgettable New Years Eve featuring 35 performers, specialty cocktails crafted from Sound Spirits liquors, award winning food from Madison Park Conservatory, desserts by Victoria Yee Howe and Theo Chocolates. Expect to enjoy an open bar and a special champagne toast at midnight, games of chance and skill, burlesque performances, music from many original Cafe (un)American performers, and full night of entertainment and surprises.”

Produced by:
State V Pan
Free Sheep Foundation
Canoe Social Club
Vital 5

Music by:
Jherek Bischoff
DJ Darek Mazzone
Gabriel Teodros
Nate Quiroga with Thomas Hunter
Sten Skogen
King Dro
DJ Steve Miller
Kate Ryan
AND featuring Special Uninvited Guests!
MC by:
Jed Dunkerley
Art installation by:
Celeste Cooning

A great bill at the Rendezvous tonight. Dull Knife, Perpetual Ritual, Baby Guns and Ryan Jobes

Tonight is the inaugural edition of MASSIVE GAUNTLET, Capitol Hill’s newest DJ night at the Highline Bar on Broadway.  Resident DJs Garek Druss (A Story of Rats, ~Dull Knife~) and Mitchell Bell (Thunder Grey Pilgrim) will be spinning metal, dark ambient, and other soul crushing sounds every 2nd Wednesday.  Come on out and get heavy!

Another great show at the Comet (Lesbian, La Otracina, Great Society Mind Destroyers, Hypatia Lake show the week before was incredible BTW)
Thanks to Mama Casserole and all the folks who support amazing touring bands like Chicago’s CAVE. Locals Are You a Cat?, Midday Veil and Kinski also tore it up for real.
Here’s a couple videos from the show featuring Portable Shrines light show by Aubrey Nehring and Rena Bussinger.

A couple of weeks ago, we bid adieu to the Portable Shrines Magic Sound Theatre DJ night at the Living Room. It was sad to see it go, but we’re glad to have the extra time to work on other projects. Fortunately for Seattle music fans, a new night is poised to fill the bi-weekly psych-shaped hole in your soul.

Flier by Andrew Reichel

The brainchild of groove gurus DJs Explorateur (Valerie Calano) and Veins (Dave Segal of The Stranger), {{{¡DISTORTIONS!}}} promises to spotlight “REVELATORY PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC FROM EARTH AND BEYOND.”

Voracious appreciators of far-out music from all over the globe and from many eras, these two obsessives take pleasure in expanding minds with their (mostly) rare, obscure, and third-ear-puncturing records. (Explorateur and Veins—who are also residents at PROG!, a bimonthly event at Living Room dedicated to prog rock’s most exciting realms—would rather read the small print in insurance policy forms than DJ with MP3s.) Psychedelic music takes many strange forms, and these savvy DJs build their sets to showcase as many as they can squeeze into the space-time continuum before last call.

{{{¡DISTORTIONS!}}} debuts tonight, Thursday November 10, 9 pm-2am at The Living Room, 1355 East Olive in Capitol Hill, with special guest MIKE NIPPER of Emerald City Soul Club and Talcum. Facebook invite here. Stop by and say hi!

When we first heard Cave‘s 2009 instrumental rock opus Psychic Psummer it was love at first listen, and we hoped that we would see them out in the Northwest sometime soon. Then last year, when they released Pure Moods, we were like, “man oh man! They HAVE to do a US tour now!”  No dice.

At long last,  on the heels of their new record Neverendless on Drag City, Cave are finally making their first ever Seattle appearance.

Neverendless is a distinctively balls-out foray into repetitive, rhythmic drone structures and sick krauty grooves. Drag City says it’s “roller-rinkin’ rock for the next generation,” whatever that means.  (All we know is, we fuckin WISH we knew about a roller rink that jammed Cave!)

Anyway, we’re pleased as punch to finally have that opportunity to host Cave in Seattle on Thursday, November 17 at the Comet Tavern, in a lineup that also includes veteran rocksters Kinski, psych shapeshifters Midday Veil and a rare performance from reclusive electro-noise darlings Are You A Cat?, plus sweaty cuts deep into the night from DJ Explorateur and visuals by Portable Shrines.

This is going to be a rager, kids.  Prepare accordingly.

Bird Dance by Virna Haffer

As most of the Northwest knows Tacoma has been turning itself around of late. Check out the Spaceworks Tacoma installations around the Theater District and take a walk around oldtown to fully grasp this rejuvenation of the artistic community. Then make sure to swing by The Tacoma Art Museum’s stunning exhibit of Virna Haffer’s Photography, Photograms and Woodcuts entitled A Turbulent Lens: The Photographic Art of Virna Haffer to ponder its very long experimental artistic legacy. Born in 1899 and raised in the anarchist community of Home, Washington Haffer began her career as a photographer in the 1920′s, continuing to create a prolific, internationally acclaimed body of work in many varied forms until the early 1970′s.

 If you cannot make it the show (it ends November 6th) the Tacoma Public Library houses an image archive of her work…

Wednesday Oct. 19th is going be the last of the Portable Shrines DJ nights at the Living Room. Come down for one final evening of phantasmagorical synesthesia and audio visual incantations. We’ll be having some super special surprise guest DJs. 9pm til close. Find the hidden door…

THANKS to all the fine folks over the past year that have made this such a fun and far out night. Fear not, there will be more trips to be had in the imminent future. The all-seeing DJ One Eye will still be available to spin records at happenings, freak-outs and boogaloo parties across the globe. Just contact info(AT)portableshrines.com

North Seattle is the place to be this Saturday, Oct. 15, with two can’t-miss events in Wallingford and Fremont respectively.  Fortunately they are close (and cheap!) enough that this time you don’t have to choose between them…

The first is a special collaboration between Midday Veil and composer/throat singer Ken Ueno, who currently teaches music composition to the long-haireds down at UC Berkeley. With the help of local luminary Garek Druss on video, Ueno and Midday Veil will transform the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Ave N) into a multimedia resonance chamber of improvised audiovisual delights.

Much more info about this one-of-a-kind performance here. Show starts at 8 pm sharp, is all ages, and although there is a $5-15 suggested donation at the door, ain’t nobody getting turned away from this one for lack of funds.

The other is the first of what will hopefully be many all-star DJ nights at Leary Records, now officially at home in its new location inside of 112 Printworks—home of Broken Press, who made those awesome silkscreen posters for Escalator III, as well as a handful of other exclusive collaborations with Portable Shrines artists Aubrey Nehring and Steve Quenell—making that spot at 112 N 36th officially thee freakiest storefront in all of Fremont.

In an era when the economy is in the shitter, record stores are closing their doors, and the corporate sinkhole of mass media still dominates the day, the emergence of a new shop dedicated to celebrating the eclecticism of the physical medium of recorded music inside of a business that has already established itself as a hub of artistic and social activity within the community is a very heartening thing.  Why not encourage it by joining them for a celebration?

Leary Records’ All Star DJ night is FREE, rages from 8 to 11 pm and features six local DJs/record weirdos (including our buddies Explorateur and Veins) spinning whatever they feel like. Expect anything from cosmic disco to psych, heavy soul to hip-hop, prog to punk to metal to jazz-funk.  Facebook invite here.

Here’s a bit more coverage from last week’s Escalator Fest III at Lo-Fi.
Thanks to Rena Bussinger for the video and images. More to come…

Soakin' up the vibes...

The tribal futurism of Swahili

This Blinding Light played a memorably transcendent improv heavy set.

Fungal Abyss at the Comet Tavern. Photo by Invisible Hour.

Portable Shrines Escalator Fest III is this Friday, September 23 and Saturday, September 24!

Friday’s lineup features performances by Midday Veil, Swahili (PDX), This Blinding Light, Lunar Grave (PDX) and The Fruiting Bodies, while Saturday will feature Fungal Abyss, Diminished Men, Rose Windows, Macrocosm (PDX) and Ayahuasca Travellers.

Tickets will be $10 per night at the door.  The sale of advance 2-day passes has ENDED. All advance sales will be at will-call. There are no physical tickets for Escalator III.

See you this weekend!

This year’s poster was the first collaboration between Aubrey Nehring and Steve Quenell. A limited edition screenprint will be available through Andrew Crawshaw at 112 Printworks in Fremont.

If you haven’t stopped by the 112 Printworks Shop you’d best do so. Aside from being a gallery of fine screenprinted art with new artists every month it also the new home to the most fabulous Leary Records formerly located at Resolution Audio in Ballard. They’ll be having a groovy DJ party next month to celebrate the merger.