Kottonmouth headlines concert
EOTO experiments with house music-jazz mix
Musically wicked twists are spinning through town next week with a couple of genre-defying shows. The Suburban Noize Records onslaught, headlined by underground heavyweights Kottonmouth Kings, slams heavy guitar riffs with rap on Sunday at The Knitting Factory. And an improv-based digital beatdown from former members of The String Cheese Incident loops house music with jazz at The Blvd. on Thursday.
King-size bill
Consistently breaking Billboard’s Top 50 as an independent with little to no help from radio or MTV, smoked-out rapcore group Kottonmouth Kings has been a force in the music underworld.
Kottonmouth has a cult following that reaches from affiliates of the Juggalos movement to the stoner crowd. In 2006, Kottonmouth Kings headlined High Times magazine’s Cannabis Cup and was named band of the year.
Aside from Kottonmouth Kings’ green efforts, Sunday’s concert showcases the punk-rap champ’s label mates on Suburban Noize Records.
The independent label has worked with high-profile projects such as Jada Pinkett Smith’s Wicked Wisdom, House of Pain’s side project La Coka Nostra, Hed P.E. and X-Clan.
This tour features a cast of the label’s up-and-comers in Swollen Members and their cohorts in Battle Axe Warriors, along with newer faces The Dirtball, Big B and Short Dawg The Native.
No strings attached
Strung from just two strands of the inventive String Cheese Incident comes a live looping experiment called EOTO.
A laptop-and-drums duo devised from the minds of String Cheese drummer and percussionist Michael Travis and Jason Hann, who served as the band’s auxiliary percussionist for a stint in 2006, EOTO is man-versus-machine trip-hop experience.
Described as glitch-hop and house, EOTO thoroughly abandons any notion of the country, bluegrass and world influences that shaped String Cheese Incident.
It leans heavily on dub-hop beats and “Star Trek”-phaser synth sounds that mimic analog-era-recall bands like Black Moth Super Rainbow, Nigo and DJ Shadow.
Yet Travis and Hann are essentially still playing in a jam band. EOTO is perhaps more jam-bandy than String Cheese, as every single chime, kick, chirp and puttatat is improvised; nothing is pre-recorded.
See it live when EOTO appears at The Blvd. with Bellingham jam-band Acorn Project.