ULNA • Standstill • Lightninging • DJ Rooney
Mon 11/11/24
7:00PM
All Ages
music
$12 ADV // $15 DOS
Show Lineup
ULNA
(Chicago, Illinois)
Genre: Indie Rock
ULNA’s OEA is a “bar-rock getting sober record.“ The first full length solo record of ULNA, aka Adam Schubert of Cafe Racer, out June, 4th via Born Yesterday Record. OEA is an ode to reinvention. Along with the release comes a rebranding–formerly Ruins, Shubert’s new pseudonym ULNA is a reference to a pivotal moment in his childhood. At the age of 14, Schubert shattered the bone on the inside of his forearm in a skating accident, and took up the guitar. “That’s what made me serious about playing music,” says Schubert.
OEA is an intensely personal record, in subject matter but also quite literally–Schubert plays every instrument, though the record feels far from a home-demo, recorded and mastered by Robby Hanes at Strange Magic Recording in Chicago’s Logan Square. Schubert’s songs are ambling and full of picked guitar and retro harmonies, a stylistic sensibility he attributes to a love for the Beatles and “acoustic rock with a weird punk edge,” a-la Big Thief and Kurt Vile. Though instrumentally sunny, his vocals hint at something else – there’s an underlying ache. OEA is an easy listen, but with a depth of emotion that demands listeners’ attention.
Lightninging
(Milwaukee, WI)
Genre: Indie, Shoegaze
Lightninging comprises various members of Milwaukee’s experimental and jazz scenes and includes current and former members of Gauss, Social Caterpillar, Frenia, The Naima, and King of Salads. The group’s widely varying musical interests and exploratory outlook produce a densely layered and continually evolving sound, in which strands of rock, jazz, electronic music, experimental music, and pop music refract each other to kaleidoscopic effect. Song structures follow a sort of warped dream logic: jagged polyrhythms give way to shoegaze-y walls of sound; a jazz-indebted dirge dissolves into a noise-laced sound collage.
Lightninging’s creative ethos is similarly layered, variously involving meticulous composition, loose improvisation, and stream-of-consciousness musings, invoking both the power of collective work and intention as well as the power of spontaneity and play; the joy of building a sonic and semantic world with your friends, wrecking the foundation and sending its building blocks tumbling to the ground, only to pick them back up again and start anew.