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38
december 9, 2011
THE YEAR IN
music
bY RYAN j. pRAdo
It’s more tempting than not to just go
ahead and crown a king of the past year’s
Rose City musical landscape. Dispense with
the long-winded, scientific algorithms, the
unending listening sessions, the constant
perusal of Pitchfork. With full awareness of
the impending onslaught of guffaws, ridicule
and “you forgot (insert name here)!”s, we
feel confident in proclaiming 2011 the year
Holcombe Waller moved from the fringe
to the forefront in Portland’s ever-morphing
“It has a kind of campfire, shamanic
vibe. It sounds very much like a
conjuring of a kind of magical, introspective
space where maybe you’re
in a melancholy state but you’re still
in touch with the kind of ephemeral,
magical vitality of being alive.”
-holcombe waller,
oN into the dark unknown
music scene.
For those listeners lucky enough to have
absorbed Waller’s gorgeously crafted album
Into the Dark Unknown this year, it goes
without saying that the primal, folk-based
soundscape he created far transcended a
gimmicky tag as a “gay album.” We’ve yet to
walk into the club that dared pump
“Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan” through
the mains, Waller’s tribal chants anchoring a
chorus of pulsing hand drums (though we’re
secretly hoping this happens one day). Yet
the album walked a fine line of eerily catchy,
nostalgic moments, interspersed sonically
with the whimsy of a wanderlusting shaman.
Waller described Into the Dark Unknown as
much during an interview with Just Out in
www.justout.com
January of this year.
“It has a kind of campfire, shamanic vibe,”
Waller offered of the album. “It sounds very
much like a conjuring of a kind of magical,
introspective space where maybe you’re in a
melancholy state but you’re still in touch
with the kind of ephemeral, magical vitality
of being alive.”
For Waller to keep in touch with that
magical side, his multi-pronged talents
compelled him to move on from the album
release, and into the trenches of
his multidisciplinary performance
piece, Surfacing, which
debuted December 2. Somewhere
in there he also scored the
possibly Oscar-nominated HIV/
AIDS documentary We Were
Here, and won a United States
Artists grant for $50,000.
That’s what’s called making it
happen, folks. And no one’s done
it better in 2011.
Some have arguably done it
just as well, though. And what
with the seesaw response to
Stumptown spoof Portlandia, it’s
a good thing Carrie Brownstein
reemerged with her new post-
Sleater-Kinney crew Wild Flag.
On stage, she’s virtually impervious
to criticism. Don’t get us
wrong; Portlandia holds some
important merit in the expanding
lexicon of Portland-based
pop culture, and Brownstein’s
been enormously informative in
that role. But with Wild Flag, we
recalled the dangerous Brownstein, wielding
an ax, coaxing fiery pop-noise along with
Mary Timony (ex-Helium), Janet Weiss
(ex-Sleater-Kinney/current Quasi/current
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks) and Rebecca
Cole (ex-The Minders). The convenient
descriptor of “supergroup” is tough to
confirm, but whatever it was that gave
growth to the band’s self-titled debut this
year was super great.
Speaking of super, Stumptown’s DIY
quilt received more punk rock patches this
year, with the second installment of the art/
music/anything goes queer festival, Not
Enough! Hatched from a grassroots queer
music-booking collective dubbed Punk
Start My Heart—founded by Sheana Corbridge
and Marlena Chavez—Not Enough!
became the physical manifestation of uniting
a splintered queer arts community,
showcasing film, poetry, visual art, bands,
whatever, as long as whatever it was had not
been shown or performed anywhere else
prior, and was created in partnership with at
least one other person.
“It’s about trying to break that isolation
that a lot of people feel,” Not Enough! organizer
Edgar Frías told Just Out in August.
AlIcIA j. RosE