The ERIS Diaries: beginnings | by Lora

We fell into this band thing ass-backwards, the three of us, not quite knowing what we were doing, whether we had something or whether we just plain sucked. I'd been organizing poetry readings for my litzine, Siren's Silence, with Matt doing electronic ambient stuff, adding atmosphere to our colorful poetry readings. Matt and I started experimenting with recording on his 4-track: my poetry with his feedback-driven, arrhythmic beautiful-freaky noises and sampled loops. Matt's friend Steve had a one-horse record label called Orange Entropy, burned cds in his basement and printed labels on his computer, put out one of our creations on a compilation. And somehow we were asked to play an Orange Entropy show with a bunch of punk bands at City Gardens in Trenton of all places. We figured our stuff wouldn't hold a punk-rock audience, so we asked Steve to play guitar with us. Unfortunately, we didn't really have any songs, so we wrote them in the 2 weeks before the show. It was a mess. As the guitar, Steve was the whole rhythm section. Matt was pretty good on the keyboards but more of a tripped-out analog electronics wizard. Steve was talented but hadn't really played much recently, and of course me, an off balance, absentminded poet with only one ear who couldn't sing. Our abilities fluctuated with our mental states and sometimes all three of us suffered bouts of low self esteem, but an intuitive voice emerged that surprised us.

In two insane weeks we wrote these songs. We didn't know if anyone but us would like them. Hell, half the time we weren't even sure if we liked them. They were simple, and very strange, due to having been written around free-verse spoken-word poetry, with echoing guitar melody loops that pulsed with the waves of sound, giving a circular structure to the madness. We based most of our changes on verbal cues, so they ran on an indefinable amout of time, and since I had no sense of 4/4 rhythm my stuff must have frustrated Steve immensely. But we made these songs.

City Gardens was tremendous, a giant stage, an echoing black gymnasium structure with bleachers in the audience. Our set started out mellow and ambient and built to a wall of sound morphing into a driving punk screamfest I called Clown Girl, ending abruptly with me falling to my knees. The audience respected us for being brave, nakedly unpredictable and intense. And afterwards, well, we had these songs. They ran through my head. For some reason, none of us wanted to let those odd little songs die. It felt like fate. Without officially forming, without a rhythm section, without a clue, we were a band.

Yellow Submarine | by Lora

On the last day of my last visit to San Francisco I was walking down the street videotaping the Mission District with this beautiful poet with four fuzzy braids I'd just met when she ran into someone she knew on the street in the Mission District. A moment later, someone at the same corner was coming up to me saying in disbelief, Lora? It was Caleb, hanging with a lucid young blond girl who shared his mischievous grin and innocent charm. I hadn't been in contact with Caleb since he left Philly two years ago. Caleb was the Radio ERIS bass player, the one we could never replace.

Caleb had played with us on and off for the first year of our band's fragile existence, when we were practicing in my mom's basement. We called it The Yellow Submarine. Caleb was a free wheel, popping up and disappearing at random moments. His style was funky and fun and in our delirious jam sessions he'd think of stuff like playing his bass with his amp or running a bottle up and down his strings.

Rehearsals were quite an affair at The Yellow Submarine, often incorporating free radicals like Matt's girlfriend taking photos or my boyfriend playing bongos and getting Matt and Steve drunk, or our friend Mike playing with digital beats and guitar, often ending with heart-pouring conversations and someone passed out on the ancient couch.

Steve, Matt and Caleb all had rows of effex pedals they were constantly twiddling, attempting not to drown each other out in a cacophony of echo. Often they spent hours trying to fix some mysterious technical problem: opening pedals, licking batteries, splicing wires, crossing cables.

Caleb, who had actually gone to school for music, helped us to develop more structure to our "songs". Embarrassingly I remember our first experiments with structure. It was a song called Coffee Drinker: cheerful swinging rock set to lyrics about coffee sucking holes in my stomach. I had labored over the poem for weeks trying to make it fit into 4/4 rhythm. It even had a refrain! We had almost killed each other trying to learn it.
The jam sessions were my favorite parts, the point when we let go and played to our imagination. Although I still couldn't sing, I found that during our jam sessions I could open my mouth and words would flow out, dancing to the psychic rhythms of the spiral-shaped jams. Whole poems and stories came out spontaneously, and sometimes I'd just play with my voice, make noises like sirens or grinding or whispers. Matt even convinced me to buy a delay pedal for my vocals, adding a whole new dimension to what my voice could do. For some reason, with echo on my voice I became less self-conscious and widened my range considerably.

I have strange memories of those days, before I moved out of my mom's house like midnight smoke breaks in the backyard that overlooked a police station. I remember one rainy night crying to Matt and Steve about my deadbeat boyfriend , only one week later to shamelessly make them wait outside before rehearsal for 10 minutes while we finished having sex.

I still often felt like a fool for even thinking I could have talent, but I knew that creating music was an ecstasy like nothing I had ever felt before, comparable in intensity only to, well, sex, of course. I had never been so close to guys in a platonic way. For once, I wasn't a gurl, I was one of the guys. They were my posse, my partners in crime. There was only one thing missing now: gigs. And the ultimate question: could, would anyone actually like our stuff?

The ERIS Diaries: Space Rock Bar-b-que | by Lora

It's last night and I'm lying under the stars listening to Doug's band Scattered Planets. The grass feels soft and scratchy underneath my arms as I listen to their tripped out soaring rock set to eighties inspired electronic beats. a The stars leap out at me and the trees seem very high from this angle, dancing with the shaking backyard music. Matt and I are next to perform, sans drummer, sans guitarist, not even having practiced in over 3 weeks. Doug, friend and supporter of Radio ERIS in all its multiple incarnations, invited us to play and somehow it's important that we do so. It's been over a month since our guitarist Steve bailed on us one more time, after 2 of the best shows we'd ever played. Just called me up half an hour before a show saying "I have nothing to give" over and over again sort of like Bartleby the Scribner.

I miss Steve. I'm not angry with him, I just don't know what to say to him. I miss playing with him; his presence inspired me. Shit, I love the guy. I've always felt a sort of kinship with him on some level of awareness that didn't seem to need words. After he quit so oddly and suddenly, I wondered if it had ever been there at all.
Anyway, it's been a tough month- dreadfully hot and I felt floundering and impotent- like I somehow managed to disintegrate anything in my life that meant anything, and the band, despite my monstrous handicaps, had meant so much to me. Then I got sick, for a week and a half was coughing up mucus the color of fluorescent yellow outliner pens.

I'm still sick but I dragged myself off the couch feeling numb and empty, like I also "had nothing to give". But I came. And little by little I felt better. The air is clear out here. Our friend from college and jam partner, Mike, who lives with Steve, is here. He tells me he's taking a screenwriting class and I tell him I'm writing the Radio ERIS story for this really cool music magazine.

Right before our set a cop comes and tells Doug to turn the music down so when we play, partially due to the placement of the amps, I can't really hear anything that well. I'm using Doug's space-age delay box for my vocals, a metal contraption with orange glowing dots you touch to determine the level of echo, but I can't hear the amplification of my voice. My Akash ex-bandmate John Price is sitting in with us, droning away on the bass, and Matt's making his wild feedback which sounds so faint from back here and my voice, still full of phlegm crackles a little and sounds feeble but I raise it anyway, chant and prowl and scream and sing. I don't care if anyone likes us. For once Im just glad to be here and alive and under stars.

When we're ready to leave, Mike offers me a lift to his house to stay till morning. Steve's there. I haven't seen or talked to him since the (band) breakup. But what the hell. I go for it. It's 4am and Mike's getting ready to head up to bed. I'm holding a notebook in my hand doodling, trying to think of what to write for the next ERIS diaries.
"Write about tonight," Mike says , " Write about writer's block; write about Steve. Write about how sad the birds in the morning sound when you've been up all night." Alone on the couch I'm still scratching mindlessly when Steve comes out in his pajamas, a confused but happy smile on his face as he sees me. He's just gotten back from a Phil Lesh show and is glowing with excitement. One of the things I've always loved about Steve is how he throws his whole spirit into the music he likes. So we sit, talking about tonight. Then he puts on a Greatful Dead video

"Do you like the Greatful Dead?" I ask. He's not sure. All the happy hippy cliché associations. But he loves Phil Lesh so he thinks he should watch this video and try to understand.

I've never been sure if I liked the Greatful Dead either. But something…

How wonderfully random, I think, me and Steve here after so much pain and silence, watching the Greatful Dead as the sun rises, maybe understanding a little more the magic of the Dead, something striving to become, unpredictable, sometimes not quite making it, sometimes creating magic and bravely forging truth, communing with the ecstatic crowd in a deeply personal way, seeking that elusive moment where the light at the end of the tunnel comes radiantly, miraculously through.

About the show on Saturday Dec. 8th 2007 with Bonnie MaCallister and The Red Masque | by Lora

Got a little time at work here so I figured I'd post a little about Saturday's show at The Highwire Gallery. What an amazing time! Everything just worked so perfectly, everyone who performed and contributed their energy in being there. It truly felt like a piece of magical communication between the performers and the audience and all the artists who contributed to the art show. This month's show had consisted of artists from the community who had brought art from all over the city to hang. I was pleasantly suprised to see so many artists I recognized, including Ed Wilcox, Bonnie Macallister, Jamie Campbell... I found myself almost wishing I had dug out and dusted off some of my old photography pieces. Oh well...next time! The amazing thing about the art show was how wonderful all the work was and how well it all went together. We had a full house by 8pm and Bonnie asked me to play guitar for her. Bonnie looked gorgeous, in a brown dress and antlers. I am always stunned by Bonnies poetry. It appears simple but has so many layers of depth, it is honest and brave and spans multiple themes and her voice is rich and captivating. I love playing guitar with her. It just sort of flows out of me. People actually asked us if we had rehearsed it. I can't wait to do it again on the 22nd for our solstice party.

Next to perform was The Red Masque. I have been a fan and friend of them ever since I danced with them at a few shows. I was the Zombie girl. It was just an incredible experience because their music is so intense. This was the very first performance of the full Red Masque band in about a year. Their drummer Vonorn suffered some serious health issues but is finally back and seeming in great spirits. He made us laugh the whole night. They are also working with a new guitarist, Andy, who is just an incrediible guitarist and works so well with their sound. The Red Masque is a complete experience, with intricate song structures and fascinating mythological lyrices, tribal beats, medieval sounding vocals, unique instruments, interspersing periods of ambient improvisation with intense dark driving songs that change mood and go unexpected places. I wish I could describe The Red Masque better, but they are just an experience. They were in top form that night. They are also quite visually stunning, beautiful people dressed as if for a masquerade in dark reds and blacks. The addition of swirling projections created the perfect visual experience. Lynnette's vocals just seem to rise forever, from a quiet almost spoken tone to insane screeching to beautiful medieval sounding melodies. Once I saw Vonorn swinging something above his head, which made a sound and then beating the drum with it like a whip.

We were up next. I have less memory of our performance because when we perform I sort of go into a trance state and do not remember things in words, but we started out with a slow ambient improv. It just happened naturally and beautifully and felt very relaxed. Earlier Lisa had told me this guy Erin was going to do projections, but when I turned around and saw what he was doing, I was mesmerised. It was just so perfect with the music. It inspired us and in turn inspired the audience. I often feel like a Radio Eris show is an energy sharing experience with us and the people who are watching. Each time we play our songs a little differently but if we are inspired by the audience things just seem to flow in the right direction and we all get to go on a little journey. That's how it felt that night, and our friend Christoph mentioned a similar experience being at the show. We played Coffee, Virus, Motherless Child then went into the Beatles/John Lennon medley: Tomorrow Never Knows into Working Class Hero, which was cool because when we planned the set we didn't know it was the anniversary of John Lennon's death, but this ended up being our tribute to John Lennon and also to the spirit of John Van Zandt who loved the Beatles. We ended the set with Pale Lights and then opened it up to a jam. People were jamming till almost 1am the music pumping out of that tiny little gallery onto Frankford Ave. I couldn't have asked for a more magical evening. Jeff Thomas videotaped the whole thing and we are working on putting together a video of the evening.

The myth of Radio Eris | by Redbeard

I had just finished buying forties and my hands were full as i made my way to the alley behind the beer stop, and I saw a vision in a black short leather skirt and thigh high leather boots stepping out of a nearby door and walking away from me. Her checkerboard shirt made her funky and tough, and i thought how lucky i would be to make friends with her instead of the handfull of homeless, ex-war veterans I was about to get totally faced with. She would'nt be able to teach me how to sing the Temptation's catalog, but I'm not much of an a-capella guy anyway.

Twenty minutes later, I had almost forgotten the checkered shirt and leather skirt, because of a fight which had broken out between two of the recipients of my hard earned forties. Two half filled bottles were broken and wielded as weapons, the beer and glass were still all in my hair and clothes, the combatants sent away to their seperate hoods or cardboard boxes, and catching my breath, I was the skirt, the shirt, the boots, and a man walking next to her carrying a keyboard.

I handed my forty over to the biggest marine in the alley and told him I'd catch up with the crew another day, and ran to meet this strange looking duo loading gear into the trunk. The woman introduced herself and lora-lai and insisted she had been inside the apartment for over an hour and there was no way I could have seen her on the street, while the man in the jean jacket seemed non-plussed, but open to the idea that there was a spirit double of lora-lai running around the streets somewhere.

Of course they were going to a gig, and of course it was great that I didn't have any plans! They offered, I jumped into the car, and the three of us headed somewhere near south street, and after just being in the city for a few weeks I had run into the core of radio eris--a band which i would not join for at least another three years. And maybe that's why the spirit double appeared to me that night--so i would always know that there was something very special happening in the lands of chaos and dischordia, that would spill over into my little world of checked blouses.

When discordia leads, you better follow willingly. don't get left behind, or the thigh-highs will walk all over you for the rest of your days.

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