Indie Sleaze 3 was a blast! July 6th at the Ottobar, slotting in right after the legendary Lydia’ Lunch’s band played an early show, was a fun combination of old and new heads. Click here for more photos on Flickr or check my Instagram (joshsisk). Probably will post a few more throughout the week on Insta as well.
The Make-Up played at the Ottobar, and what a great show! I hadn’t seen the Make-Up since they last played Baltimore (at Lith Hall – check out the photos from that show here) in 2013, I don’t believe. Maybe they haven’t even played since then, I don’t know? They sounded even better this time, I think, and the Sassiest Boy In America still has his stage moves down pat as well, which was heartening. Speaking of that infamous article, that is actually probably how I first heard of the Make-Up, and maybe even NoU, as I remember seeing a copy of that Sassy at at a friend’s house when it came out. In ’91 I would have already have gotten into hardcore like Minor Threat and so forth, I think, but Nation of Ulysses would have probably been too weird for me.
No appearance from The Vortex at the show, at least not in costume, but I hope he is okay whoever he is. (Incidentally, I drunkenly accused Jason Hamacher of being the Vortex once and he told me who it was, but now I forget). Incidentally, it’s really hard to Google the Vortex, so if you have any good Vortex pics or stories, please reply.
Anyway, here is A LINK TO ALL THE PHOTOS
LINKS ROUNDUP
Judy @ Holy Frijoles – 6/27/2024
Sleep Inside Its Message @ Ottobar – 3/6/2024
Photos from two cool local Baltimore shows with two cool Baltimore bands, both fairly new. Well, SIIM used to be Near Dark, but some other band sued them, or something, which is funny since it’s the name of a well known (and awesome) vampire movie so how can you sue over that, but whatever. It’s cool to see new bands forming with well seasoned old Baltimore heads and both of these were fun nights – both floor shows, one at Holy Frijoles and one at the Ottobar. Baltimore still rules.
Incidentally, if you are one of the few people subscribing to these updates via email, I plan to send these out more regularly AND post to my site more regularly, though we shall see if I stick to that. Feel free to reach out with any thoughts or suggestions.
Hey, here’s some pictures from Saturday night! Click the image to load it in full:
Current Space is one of my favorite places in Baltimore, especially their wonderful outdoor space. This past Thursday, I photographed their Fall Members Party. These events are for supporting members of Current (which I am), and are always a blast. Every time I go I meet exciting and interesting people as well as get to see old friends as well. Highly recommend you join and support the arts in Baltimore (and get free drinks and entertainment!)
Hi! Photos from the Indie Sleaze party on 10/20/2023 @ the Ottobar will be posted here! Probably not for a couple of days.
Sunday Night Update! Working through these, look for more photos Monday! I might break it into a couple posts, since there’s alot of photos! If you post these on IG, please tag @joshsisk and @theottobar
Next batch up! Probably 1 more coming tomorrow! If you post any of these on IG please tag @joshsisk and @theottobar :D
Here are the last of the photo booth photos from the first Indie Sleaze party, above! Thanks so much for being involved in this fun night, and this fun new photo booth spin for me. Instead of doing a booth with normal portrait strobes, I have been wanting to try to take dance/stage lights and light a photo booth that way. It was a fun experiment and I learned quite a bit for next time! (Thanks to one Daniel Deacon for lending me his stage lighting for this experiment.)
And here are some photos of the festivities as well, of course:
Club Mutant was an underground party that Door did at America, with noise/electronic/avant artists, but (as I recall) this night was a collaboration with Mark Brown, Schwarz (who is now known as So Drove) and Cex who had done a variety of dance parties in the past. This was at the Paradox, and apparently I photographed this for Noisey, Vice Media’s music vertical which no longer exists. The article doesn’t seem to be online anymore, sadly. Hopefully I got paid!
This was a fun night that I remember pretty well because it was such a cool mix of artists and genres – the kind of genre mixing event that Baltimore has always done so well. Soft Pink Truth (aka Drew Daniel) had just released the Why Do The Heathen Rage? album, which was a Black Metal re-interpolation, so he was in full SPT/Black Metal regalia and some metal friends were here for that. Baltimore Club innovator Blaqstarr DJed along with Shawn Smallwood and some others. Shams performed. Gabber Blood Rave artist Kilbourne DJed along with the Schwarz.
This night was also funny because one of my friends disappeared and we thought he had just caught a taxi home, but then it turns out he fell asleep in the Paradox and woke up when the janitors were cleaning up – at like 9am!
If anyone reading this has any memories, details, flyers, etc to add to this, feel free to comment below, or @ me and I’ll add them. I’m “joshsisk” at IG/Twitter/BlueSky/Threads/whatever dozen other new social media sites have been created in the time it took me to type this.
It’s kind of scary to realize that this was over twenty years ago… anyway, in the dim dark recesses of the past I used to book shows, generally either at the punk house I lived in in Adelphi, MD called THE DIRTFARM, or at Charm City Art Space or Warehouse Next Door.
Since there is an upcoming Black Eyes reunion, I figured I would dig some photos from one Black Eyes show at the Dirtfarm. I want to say they played there twice, but maybe it was just once, and it was a great show as I recall. All these photos are from the basement.
I had moved to the DC suburbs just the year before, and Black Eyes quickly became my favorite local band. I remember buying their seven-inch from them out of the back of a car at Fort Reno and after that, I have no idea how many times I saw them in various basements or group houses around the DC area in those years, and then finally, their last show at the Black Cat. Them breaking up seemed like an end of an era moment for me, along with a few other similar events, and I ended up moving to Baltimore not long after!
In the ensuing years their early 7″ songs and the first album especially have been something I come back to often, they really hold up, as does the second album, and are super evocative and nostalgic for me. Really happy to have booked a show of theirs at my house, and even more excited to be able to see them again soon, again at the Black Cat! Enjoy these photos!
NOTE: If anyone has any other photos from this show, or video, or a flyer, please reach out! I’ll add it here. Would love any other DIRTFARM related ephemera as well.
Photo Galleries: Check out all the BLACK EYES photos from this show on Flickr (remember Flickr?) | Here’s another Flickr gallery from that era that has other show photos from the Dirtfarm
What a great party! Current Space is a really special place, and one of the fun things they offer is parties for members. You get the satisfaction of supporting a vital community art space AND you get to party with like-minded people. I myself am a member! Find out more here: https://www.currentspace.com/membership
I’m doing a live photobooth at this Taylor Swift Revenge night at the beloved OTTOBAR tonight. It’s my first photobooth since lockdown, etc. Should be fun.
Continue reading
ALMS
MURDER
Wow, this is my first photo post since the pandemic. And at the first show at the newly opened Metro Gallery. Felt really good to be here. At some point, maybe, I’ll write some sort of bloggy post reflecting on the last year or so, but for now, it’s just cool to post these photos.
SEE ALL THE MURDER / ALMS PHOTOS 2021/11/12 METRO GALLERY PHOTOS HERE
We are spending a LOT more time inside due to current events, and we are all getting a bit stir crazy already, so I thought I would do a little write up about this fun activity we’ve been doing – playing Jackbox Party pack (from the makers of You Don’t Know Jack) with friends in their houses.
Jackbox is a great game for this, since even if you are playing all together in the same room, everyone uses their phone as the controller. So playing over the internet, you just need a way to see one person’s screen, and for everyone to be able to hear each other, which Discord can provide. One person will need a copy of the game, but everyone else just needs a single computer or tablet with Discord (so they can see the game) and then each player just needs a smartphone or tablet (so they can play the game).
Here’s how we set it up:
Step 1: Create (or Join) a Discord
Discord is free and is basically like Slack for gaming – with the added features of being able to make voice channels where everyone in them can talk, and the ability for people to “go live” and show their screen to everyone else. I recommend the person running the game on their computer run the Discord app on their computer, but there is a web interface as well. It’s probably okay if the players just use the web version.
Step 2: Join a Voice Channel
Everyone playing needs to be in a voice channel in Discord, which means that any one in that voice channel can talk to each other using their microphone and hear through their speakers. Every Discord server should start with a “General” voice channel, but you can make more.
You can, depending on your computer’s setup, adjust your audio to do different things. For example, we plugged our laptop into our TV and had the video and audio output through the TV. But we set the audio input to be via a pair of bluetooth wireless earbuds (we each had one earbud).
Step 3: Go Live
Then the person actually running the game needs to click the “go live” button which streams the game to everyone else in that channel. Everyone should be able to see their screen (aka the game), and everyone should be able to talk and hear each other now!
Step 4: Join the Game
The last thing that makes it all possible is that how Jackbox works is that the game displays a 4-letter code that you punch into a website, JACKBOX.TV to log into the game. Do this on a phone or tablet and the device becomes the game controller – it lets you answer questions, buzz in etc. I recommend setting your device to not shut the screen off while you play, sometimes you lose connection if the screen goes to sleep.
That’s it! Now everyone should be able to hear each other talk, and see the person hosting the game’s screen!
What to Play?
i recommend Fibbage, which is in the Jackbox Party Pack as a great game to use since it doesn’t involve reaction time – everyone just compete to make up the best sounding answer to questions, using their phone as controller/keyboard. But Jackbox has plenty of other games, though games where someone has to buzz in first may be tricky since the person hosting the game will have much better odds of going first due to lag. And, of course, you can play other stuff too!
Comment below or tweet at @joshsisk if you have any corrections or suggestions!
Sunday I photographed the Carly Rae Jepsen show at Fillmore Silver Spring for the Washington Post , and I was super excited for this because, for one, Carly Rae rules, and two I was quite sure she would be a great and photogenic performer. I was right! it was a great time, and she was a pleasure to watch – her and all her band/stage people all seemed to be having a great time, too, which was nice. I am not an expert on her music, so not much to add besides it’s nice to see a pop star that seems to have a great relationship with their fans and really seems to enjoy what they do – that’s surprisingly rare, I’ve found. A really fun night!
There are a bunch more photos in the album below, so check em out!
Trucked down to scenic Bristow VA for this show, which was the show where Lil Wayne made some controversial statements about quitting the tour, and his place on it (though I believe it all worked out in the end) and only played a few songs, which disappointed some. The show was pretty sparsely attended when Tunechi went on, but I think a lot of that was just the insane rainstorm keeping people from making it on time, because it looked a lot more crowded by the time Blink-182 played.
I accepted this assignment mainly because I had never seen Lil Wayne, so was a bit disappointed that it seemed like he wasn’t really giving it his all, and the reviewer seemed to agree. However, I thought a bit more of the Blink-182 set (though I only saw the first 3 songs, of course). I am not at all a Blink fan, but was struck by the fact that the band seemed to be having fun – poking fun at each other, and just in general enjoying themselves – which is more than you can expect from a LOT of bands tour after 20+ years.
TURNSTILE
RED DEATH
ABUSE OF POWER
UNIFIED RIGHT
DRESS CODE
RAZORBUMPS
BACCHAE
See all my photos from the night here | Read the Washington Post piece about it here
This was a fun shoot – Prosthetic Records wanted some photos to commemorate the addition of Adam Clemans to the Skeletonwitch line-up, and they were in town recording with Kevin Bernsten of Developing Nations, so we did a quick session. They ended up needing to shoot a live video of them in the studio as well, so I helped out with that also, so some of my footage ended up in this:
A little while back, I photographed Baltimore musician and artist TRNSGNDR/VHS at a special performance at the Walters Art Museum. It was part of the Art/Sound/Now series, which brings in artists to do site-specific performances in the Walters’ space. Quite an experience, it was interesting to see the crowd move in and out of the space full of classical works, while listening to Alexandra’s very contemporary piece.
READ THE ARTICLE ON BANDCAMP | SEE ALL THE PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT
We also did a quick portrait session before the show, and I like how some of the shots turned out…
I recently got a chance to tag along to Baltimore’s annual Free Ball – a vogue dancing event that supports HIV awareness and testing among the city’s LGBT community. It’s a fun event that engages the Vogue community by hosting a free contest, but to enter you have to get tested, and there are a lot of various health resources on site, seems like a great and surprisingly “with it” city-funded event. For more information on Vogue dancing and this event, you can read this article about last year’s event.
