Photo by Chase Macri

On January 12-14th, the bands Jack Buck and Coward set out across the midwest to play four shows in three days. The tour, entitled the “Home Turf” tour, went through each of the three cities the members of the bands live: Kansas City, Columbia and St. Louis. The below video shows live and candid footage of the bands throughout the three day tour.

For their EP My Heart Is The Eastern Horizon, the Nashville band Clemency decided to release each of the EP’s five songs individually a month at a time as singles, a tactic bands are increasingly exploring. But what makes Clemency unique is each single was also released as a music video.

“We’ve never really shot videos before,” says Jason Watkins, lead vocalist and guitarist of Clemency. “We were like ‘What if we shot a video for every song and release them as singles?’”

The band wrote the music and the screenplays for each of the songs, and videographer Joey Williams filmed and edited the videos. The band released the first single “The Wild Wind” on June 27th to Youtube and iTunes and repeated that process every month until each video was out. Watkins was happy with the results:

“Each video got a couple thousand plays in the first weeks,” he says. “They each topped out at like 5,000 or whatever. We were really pleased as an indie band that doesn’t have a lot of marketing push.”

Clemency are a truly independent band without a record label or access to significant capital to market their music. Beyond promoting with social media, the band used Google Adwords to get exposure:

“Our whole strategy was to put $500 dollars towards marketing for each video,” Watkins explains. “We ended up doing Adwords and different marketing through Google. They had taken notice of what we were doing and the attention we were getting and a representative contacted us and said ‘I think there’s some things we can do to maximize exposure.’ We had one more video to release. So we worked with Google and the video ended up having 73,000 plays in one week. In one week!”

With the success of the videos, and the responses the band has received from fans via Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and in person the band hopes to continue a similar method for promotion in the future.

“It would be kind of hard to sustain; making a quality video for every song you write. But I think it could be done. It’s ambitious, but I think we’ve proved to ourselves we can do it. And if you do it well you can be known as the band that does that. ‘Oh, that’s the band that does videos for all their songs.’”

“My Heart Is The Eastern Horizon” was released digitally on January 3rd and can be downloaded from iTunes. The EP will be available physically at the band’s CD release show on January 11th at The Rutledge in Nashville, TN. Clemency’s videos can be seen on their Youtube page.

Video of Kevin Harris performing at Floating Labs

Floating Laboratories is one of a crop of new underground, do-it-yourself venues hosting alternative, experimental and noise music in St. Louis. Most of the events are spread through word of mouth, or announced via blog posts on sites like Josh Levi’s Flood Yr Face blog (check out an interview with Josh Levi here).

Several such noise and experimental musicians and also a folk guitarist from in and out of town played Friday, December 16th at Floating Labs and it felt nostalgic to fellow St. Louis noise musician Travis Bursik (of the duo Ou Où). “Shows like these remind of when I was living in Ann Arbor, [Michigian]. DIY venues, BYOB, very intimate settings and everyone who’s here is here for the right reasons.”

Floating Labs tend to feature musicians who create their music from samples, loops and synthetic instruments as opposed to traditional band instruments like guitars and acoustic drums. To the uninitiated, this kind of musical production is perceived as random button pressing on keyboards and computers. Bursik is annoyed by this perception: “A lot of the time people don’t understand that we’re not just messing around up there,” he says. “Everything is very meticulously planned. There’s a lot of editing yourself involved too, you’re not just releasing everything because less than half of what you do is good.”

Video of Ryley Walker performing at Floating Labs

The word “success” can mean many things. It can be measured by the level of income an individual makes a year. It can be shown by owning a house, a car, by having a certain prestige in your field or title at your job. For musicians, “success” could be having a record deal, going on tour, having a single on the radio. For Josh Levi, success is more about inspiring people than anything else. Levi is a St. Louis musician, music writer and concert promoter and has been involved in the music scene for nearly a decade. He promotes local music on his blog, Flood Yr Face, and both online and in print for the entertainment, arts and culture newspaper the Riverfront Times. On top of promoting and writing about music, Levi also plays guitar in nrml ppl and performs as a one man experimental noise band under various pseudonyms.

Levi had a chance to talk about how he measures success outside of the mainstream definition in the above audio interview. The photos of Levi below were taken at Floating Laboratories in St. Louis, MO.

Photo by Anthony Ryan Tripoli

Michael Gerhardt is a unique individual. Bassist of Jack Buck, a St. Louis, MO based hardcore noise rock band, Gerhardt has played in bands for more than ten years. Starting in high school punk bands, Gerhardt has played guitar, bass, drums and lead vocals in groups of all styles and is still a wellspring of musical ideas. His bandmates describe him as a “riff machine” as he seems to have an endless supply of bass lines and guitar parts in stock. In the video below, Gerhardt explains why he prefers bass to guitar, how he got into “heavy” music to begin with and shows off his tattoos. He also plays a few riffs.

Fifteen years is a long time to be doing anything. It is an especially long time for a band. On Friday November 18th, The Conformists celebrated fifteen years of playing music together. Despite the joyous setting, the evening was also bittersweet as the bands vocalist, Mike Benker, feels that fifteen years is enough for him. The band explains their feelings on Benker’s departure and moving forward in the above video interview.

The above video is an example of basic video storytelling that describes the songwriting process of the band Jack Buck. The bands songs are melodically disharmonic and rhythmically complicated, and their assembly involves more counting than it does feel initially. The video shows the band working through their songs and was shot in the bands practice space in St. Louis, MO.

Jucifer is an institution. The Athens, Georgia duo consisting of married couple Amber Valentine and Edgar Livengood have been making music and touring constantly for the past eighteen years. Recently via the bands Twitter account, Valentine and Revolver Magazine editor-in-chief Brandon Giest got into a war of words over Revolver’s annual special issue entitled “The Hottest Chicks in Metal” (which has recently been renamed “The Hottest Chicks in Hard Rock”. You can )

I asked Valentine what about the magazine’s special feature she takes exception to as well as writer Kim Kelly’s recent article for The Atlantic that argues the “Hottest Chicks” issue perpetuates a fallacy that women are a novelty in metal music.

The interview and live performance was shot at Fubar in St. Louis, MO on Saturday, November 5th.

This photo slideshow details the process my band, Jack Buck, underwent to produce a record. The photos shows us practicing, recording, mixing, mastering, and finally, reproducing “Ugly”, our debut 7″. I have included narration detailing the entire process while illuminating the photos and including one of the songs from the 7″ as the soundtrack. “Ugly” is available for purchase or free download from our bandcamp page. Jack Buck can be followed on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Click here for my live review of KEN mode