JAVELIN

Saturday 12:30 AM at the Big Ears Annex
Gang Gang Dance w/ Javelin & Forest Magic

Javelin consists of two cousins, Tom Van Buskirk and George Langford. They started making music together in Providence, RI in 2004, although their earliest collaborative tapes date back to a bunk bedroom near the sea shore. They are signed to Luaka Bop records and now live in New York.  The duo has played venues as diverse as the children’s branch of the Olneyville Public Library (RI), to the Museum of Modern Art (NY), both of which happened in the same week.

In performance, Javelin will 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.

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.