Javelin and Lemonade

Saturday, May 15, 2010. Hartford Party Starters Union presents:


Location:
The Warehouse
45 Bartholomew Avenue
Hartford, CT

$5 - 10:00pm - 21+ to drink - 18+ to get in




For performances Javelin use colorfully painted boomboxes that form large speaker totems (“boombaatas”) which can hang from the ceiling or stack up on the floor like pyramids. The signal from the show is broadcast via FM transmitter, thereby fostering audience participation (B.Y.O.Boombox) or fueling battery-powered, mobile parties.

The duo has played venues as diverse as the children’s branch of the Olneyville Public Library (RI), to the Museum of Modern Art. When not performing, Javelin is busy producing. Together they have amassed a vast catalogue of music, varying in its aesthetic range. Songs resemble the record collection from whence they spring, if not literally as when sampling, then figuratively as when past forms are cited and recontextualized.

Sounds range from broken dance jams to relaxed instrumental cut-ups, created with love on their MPCs. Long forgotten samples are chopped and re-assembled with drums, wooden recorders, old keyboards, handmade thumb pianos or whatever instruments are readily at hand. The result is a kind of mix tape fantasy (residing in the mythical “dollar bins of the future”), where R&B impresarios, amateur booty bass producers and Andean flautists hold equal sway.




Lemonade played their first show with roughly 2 weeks of preparation in late 2005. The idea formed a month or so earlier when Alex Pasternak and Callan Clendenin were in Barcelona enjoying their time listening to Rai and Khaliji CDs they had bought at the Raval record shop “Nasifon”, laying on the beach drinking sodas, and going to squat raves until well after the sun came up. Collaborating with Ben Steidel upon their return, they mingled together crude technologies, battered percussion, live instruments, and limitless disparate influence, including: grime, early house and techno, samba, dancehall, island musics, and scary psychedelic noise. The show was mostly improvised, and ultimately a success with throngs of dancers mesmerized by their pulsing beats and clamorous crescendos.

Since that first show, Lemonade became a fixture in San Francisco’s underground, playing everything from basement shows to warehouses, dance clubs to DIY venues, art galleries and rooftops. Their eruptive and exhilarating live experience can be at times unnerving and chaotic, as well as transporting and blissful, but still manages to unify diverse crowds in rapturous euphoria.

In October of 2008, their self-titled debut album/ep, recorded by Chris Coady (TV on the Radio, Blonde Redhead, etc.) was released on True Panther Sounds. Days later they moved to Brooklyn.

Mary Anne Hobbs of BBC1 referred to them as “pure, agile, hedonistic pop music,” and Pitchfork rated their debut at an 8.3. Over the course of their career they have toured with such acts as Tussle, El Guincho, and Glasser, as well as provided local support to Modeselektor, Crystal Castles, Buraka Som Sistema, Andrew W.K., Gang Gang Dance, and many more.