I don't take much time to be a real blogger on this blog of mine, but I thought a new track out by Icky Blossoms was a good enough excuse. It's called "Babes" and I think it rules.
The band put on an awesome show this past Friday at the Slowdown. You can check out a shitty video I took on my phone. Just tilt your head to left, and you're good to go.
Icky Blossoms has pretty much been a well-kept secret, with Derek Pressnall (Tilly and the Wall, Flowers Forever) and Nik Fackler (Flowers Forever, InDreama) working in the studio and collab-ing with the likes of Jacob Thiele and Clark Blaechle (The Faint) and Teal Gardner (UUVVWWZ). They only have three tracks up on the web as of now, but have many on standby, as their set proved at the Slowdown.
Nik Fackler was probably shaking the sand out of his shoes when I got ahold of him to discuss his outfit InDreama. The musician/filmmaker just finished escaping the Los Angeles asphalt for an evening of ocean gazing, only to be met by a prolonged traffic jam on the returning commute. He needed some nature, he says, after spending the day putting his projects in line before his two-week leave to Omaha the next day.
With eight current projects — since first trekking to LA last summer with two — Fackler clearly hasn't become a beach bum. Over the past year, he’s finished InDreama's debut record and then some, collaborating with Flowers Forever pal Derek Pressnall (Tilly and the Wall) through their dance music project Icky Blossoms — swapping ideas and stepping in the studio whenever he’s back in Omaha. This time, Fackler’s back to celebrate the release of a four-way, double 7-inch split featuring Indreama, Icky Blossoms, Conduits and Darren Keen persona Touch People 9 p.m. tonight (April 15) at the Slowdown.
InDreama’s lineup is quite the array. Capgun Coup/No I’m The Pilot’s Sam Martin isn’t quite the beholder of the band’s art-rock style, Fackler says, “but I think he likes the challenge.” He accompanies Fackler with vocals and guitar.
A New Year music video by Nik Fackler, starring Capgun's Sam Martin
Film industry friend Aaron Gum is the poet on synth, he says. Percussion will be on the double with Craig D. (Tilly, David Dondero) and add-on Kevin Donahue.
And then there’s Dereck Higgins. The local bass virtuoso has been deeply connected to Fackler, he says, since Fackler's puppy days as a 21-year-old picking up the guitar with The Family Radio. So it’s not surprising that Higgins influences Fackler’s first legitimate LP. Fackler definitely did some growing first, though.
“Family Radio, I look back and sort of feel like that was learning to play music,” he says, “cause as soon as I learned guitar I kinda started a band, and was sort of putting it all together. But then once we recorded the music, I didn’t like how it sounded.”
InDreama picks up from where his first band left off. Initially just a recording project, Fackler found his bearings with recording and production through experimentation. He also took the time to feel out the sound, with the goal of harnessing something interesting, not normal.
“InDreama is sort of my way of learning how to make an atmosphere for a song to exist in,” Fackler says, “which I think I learned a lot from working on Lovely, Still, and growing as an artist over those two years,” he says of his 2008 first feature film, shot in Omaha.
The album is set for release by this summer on Slumber Party Records. It’s untitled, and may never have a name to put to its 12 tracks, he says.
“The world that I was living in when I was writing, mixing and making the record isn’t the world that I live in now, internally and mentally,” Fackler says. “So it’s sort of weird to name something when I’m not connected to it anymore.”
Fackler began writing the music as he traveled from film festival to film festival promoting Lovely, Still. The creative free time was a nice change from being 100 percent busy with the film, he says. Entirely new experiences and feelings, as well as falling in and out of love with a girl, shaped the album’s lyrics and variant of tones. He made sure to leave behind genre limitations and any doubts about what he was creating, he says. All musical expression had to be captured.
If there’s one word to describe the album, Fackler says, it would be eccentric. Interests in prog rock and classical music, thanks to Higgins, are mustered in with the experimental — the quality that really glares golden with an incredible range of sound elements, percussive and synthesized. Fackler touches totally different spectrums of vocals, something he says represents different characters within a story, on a journey depicted in a world called Dreama. In no way is he necessarily trying to sing like himself.
And possibly the most interesting detail: The album’s dynamic nods to a classical music listening experience (see the nine-minute electro-cadence epic “Exodus from Reunion, A + Storm ^ Great = End”).
