Were the name Tapes ’N Tapes not already taken, it would be an appropriate
“I appreciate the opportunity to keep the music living,” she says. “To some degree, it’s about sharing that part of things, and also, it’s demonstrative of the process or some of the processes I go through in creating all this stuff.”
title for Sapat’s forthcoming full-length (and when we say forthcoming, we mean possibly next year).
Kris Albplanalp, a founding member, has spent hours combing through Sapat’s home recordings dating back seven years, from which the band’s follow-up to 2007’s Mortise and Tenon will be fashioned.
“It’s just about two to five hours every single day for seven years,” says Albplanalp, who, along with the rest of Sapat’s rotating cast, play Terrastock 7 at 8:30 p.m. Saturday.
Excavating the band’s past sessions has been a bittersweet experience, given that occasional member Matt Mason and longtime sideman David Sauter have both died in recent years.
“On the whole, it’s more a feeling of celebrating,” he says. “It’s a fun way to remember a good time, although there are times I feel sentimental, too.”
Sapat is one of five Louisville or Louisville-connected bands slated to play. The Photographic is promoting its new release, Pictures of a Changing World; Antietam, fronted by Tara Key, has doubled its output this go-round with Optus Mixtum; while Parlour and Tara Jane O’Neil round out the local contingent.
O’Neil, a self-described karaoke fan (“I have a limited range, but I can nail some Olivia Newton-John jams”), has called Portland home for quite some time. She came across Terrastock in Europe, where she was asked to play one of the affiliated Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine’s tea parties — a series of intermittent one-offs
leading up to the big shebang this weekend. She and many of her longtime local collaborators will come together at 1:50 p.m. Saturday.
“It’s a brand new baby,” O’Neil says of her forthcoming solo record, which she hopes to have finished in September. She describes it as a quasi-breakup album that’s more about finding the joy in the breakup than wallowing in the negatives of it.
Meanwhile, you’re bound to find her latest record-artbook combo, Wings, Strings, Meridians, somewhere among the merch. The 96-page art book is devoid of any written narrative, containing paintings O’Neil completed over the last three years. The recordings are equally mercurial, consisting of demos, outtakes and assorted sonic tangents. You can hear her clearing her throat on one song as she searches for the right melody.
O’Neil’s penchant for jubilant audience participation has manifested itself in ecstatic ways. From time to time, at home and abroad, she has foisted upon the masses a batch of handy tambourines to be played at certain times during her set. She’s dubbed the motley crew The Ecstatic Tambourine Orchestra. Last spring at a show in Turkey, the “players” expanded their oeuvre to include glasses, bottles and shakers for nearly 45 minutes.
It’s anyone’s guess whether the orchestra will appear this weekend, so you might want to bone up on your rhythm.
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