Booed Music

• Who is Chrissy Vasquez? Booed knows this local solo artist has a healthy online presence, and we’ve seen her perform on local stages and watched her moody black-and-white video for ‘Nightmares,’ but efforts to contact her have turned up nada. What we can say is that Vasquez has a Martina Topley-Bird smoky voice, and she surrounds it with low-tech beats and manic moods on the tracks she’s posted on her Soundcloud page in the past few weeks. She’s holding a listening party for her “Sola’moor” release Aug. 8 at the Windup Space with Hi$to, Rakim Miles, Jujuan Allen, TT the Artist, 83 Cutlass, and Al Rogers. This is trip-hop about a world overrun by anti-anxiety meds and DIY horror movies. Kinda cool; kinda frightening. 

• Ami Dang (pictured), the local left-field pop charmer, is currently touring the states with the Puerto Rican puppetry troupe Poncili Creacion. And she’s touring with a new self-released album, her first since her gorgeous “Hukam” that Ehse released in 2011. “Inauspices” continues Dang’s ability to send her melodious voice sailing over her combination of South Asian rhythms and undulating electronics waves. It’s pop music that feels jettisoned from another time and place, especially ‘Kissed by the Fire,’ a groove that rubs a hiccupping beat out of percussive vocalizations and disorienting drums. Dang stops by the Holy Underground Aug. 3 as she heads up the East Coast, before returning on Aug. 23  for the three-day Fields Festival held in Susquehanna State Park.

• Speaking of that weekend in the woods, Fields Festival sounds like it wants to be DIY Baltimore’s epic statement. Over the Aug. 22-24 weekend, nearly the entirety of Baltimore’s fringe-leaning arts community—Dan Deacon, Matmos, Jeff Carey, Tim Paggi, Jimmy Joe Roche, and pretty much anybody who has ever invited you to a warehouse show, performance, gallery opening, comedy night, etc. on Facebook—is heading up to Ramblewood campground in Darlington, Maryland. It will be a magic gathering of avant-garde Baltimore in Harford County. Booed hopes this ends up being more Woodstock than Altamont. 

• Finally, Booed has a soft spot for New Zealand rock: For whatever reason the Oceanic country just knows how to weld melancholy euphoria to apathetic irreverence in hummable noise better than any other English speakers, and Civil Union is the latest example of such. This Auckland trio rattles out tunes with a menacing downer sneer (go online and find the bizarre, NSFW, found-footage video for its ‘Love Makes Slaves of Us All’), and its 2013 self-titled EP showcased a group with a devastatingly infectious glass-half-empty, everything-is-going-to-hell attitude a la New Zealand greats the Skeptics. Civil Union hits the Windup Space July 30 with Estrogen Highs, Joy Classic, and Boy Spit.