Music at the Jersey City Studio Tour
At Victory Hall (186 Grand Street) on Friday, October 1
From: Jersey City
Style: Latin jazz
Description: A supple, shimmering jazz combo led by a local singer whose vocals flash across the tracks like quicksilver.
Revealing Factoid: The RV Project recently toured galleries and restaurants in Miami Beach and South Florida.
At The Grove Street PATH Station on Saturday, October 2
From: New Jersey
Style: Drums, voice, dance
Description: An explosion of cross-rhythms and performance energy -- two women with a bewildering array of percussion instruments and a manic drive to get the crowd shaking.
Revealing Factoid: Lara & Yael have traveled to Guinea to perform and study African traditional music.
From: Iowa and Salt Lake City, via Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Style: Synth-pop
Description: Immediate, infectious dance-pop. Apocalyptic and authoritarian lyrics delivered by a winsome, All-American couple.
Revealing Factoid: "Evacuation", the title track of their latest album, appeared on the Electroclash 2 compilation.
From: Jersey City, New Jersey
Style: Alt-rock, post-punk
Description: Hyperliterate, aggressive, uptempo, brainy. Singer Jim Teacher rambles, declaims, and tells his harrowing stories in a voice that sounds like he gargles with glass.
Revealing Factoid: Guitarist Brother Stephen is a familiar participant in the Waterbug's Thursday night poetry series, and a contributor to local literary websites and magazines.
From: New York City
Style: Indiepop
Description: The Vitamen's classically-written songs are painfully honest, invariably moving and often hilarious expressions of modern urban neuroses.
Revealing Factoid: These guys have been friends since high-school, and they harmonize like they've been singing together forever.
From: New York City
Style: Guitar alt-rock
Description: Supermelodic, sugar-coated rock songs; radio-ready and passionately delivered.
Revealing Factoid: Several members of Marwood attended Berklee School of Music.
From: Hackensack, New Jersey
Style: Rock, with a few nods to alt-country
Description: Hallucinatory, alternately Dylan-cool and Stones-solid; fever-dreams, ragged glory, ferocious explosions of fury and frustration.
Revealing Factoid: If this act looks familiar to you, you might have seen them before: they used to be Cropduster, a North Jersey favorite.
At 111 First Street on Saturday, October 2
From: 111 First Street, Jersey City
Style: Free jazz
Description: Impressionistic improvisatory explorations, frequently leading to moments of great serendipity and raw tonal beauty.
Revealing Factoid: Several members of the Jam Band will be exhibiting visual art during the Studio Tour.
From: Larchmont, New York
Style: Singer-songwriter
Description: Literate, open-handed Milton writes songs of love for the city and its inhabitants, and delivers his stories in a raspy, engrossing baritone.
Revealing Factoid: Milton hosts semi-regular theme nights and rock and roll variety shows at Pete's Candy Store in Brooklyn.
From: Jersey City, NJ
Style: Glitch-pop, alternative rock
Description: A wholly successful fusion of electronic recording techniques and rock edge, the live version of Lismore is more urgent, more desperate, and more two-fisted than the elegant band responsible for We Could Connect Or We Could Not.
Revealing Factoid: Synthesist and producer Stephen Hindman will be familiar to techno fans as DJ Kingsize.
From: New Jersey, New York
Style: Rock
Description: Sincere, soulful, guitar-driven, harmonic. Jeff Baker keeps the beats solid and powerful, and charismatic Matt Kurzban shouts over the top.
Revealing Factoid: Drummer Baker has been a tenant at 111 First Street for more than fifteen years.
From: Wayne, New Jersey
Style: Dense, byzantine power-pop
Description: Start with XTC's most bugged-out experiments in pop song construction, and push further into the enchanted forest from there.
Revealing Factoid: Band principles David Nagler and Thom Soriano once performed music to accompany a screening of Battleship Potemkin.
From: Jersey City
Style: Hard-living Southern boogie, Jersey-style
Description: Scalding, Seventies-inspired guitar rock about girls, cheap alcohol, and blowing your hand off with your own weapon.
Revealing Factoid: The boys of Chariot! double as producers and engineers at Grisly Labs, a premier Jersey City indie recording studio.
At the Grove Street PATH Train Station on Sunday, October 3
From: North Jersey
Style: Post-punk
Description: Emotional, guitar-driven, frequently theatrical rock music buttressed by a thoughtful, creative rhythm section.
Revealing Factoid: AOTO has two full-length albums: one called Red, and the other Blue.
From: New Brunswick, New Jersey
Style: Indiepop, acoustic music
Description: Frequently using toy instruments, the Crayon Rosary is childlike, playful, tuneful, and charming.
Revealing Factoid: The band's label, XOXO Records, is headquartered in Bayonne.
From: Metuchen, New Jersey
Style: Folk-rock
Description: Grand, sweeping narratives of guilt, love lost on the highway, car crashes, early death, and pancakes.
Revealing Factoid: Debut album If Shacking Up Is All You Want To Do references Springsteen and the Jenny Jump mountains, and rhymes "Branson" with "line dancin'".
From: Dunellen, New Jersey
Style: Power-pop, pop-prog
Description: Fork-bendingly virtuosic musicianship from a band that walks the line between Supertramp gloss and the quirkiness of They Might Be Giants.
Revealing Factoid: Frontman and synthesist Tom Brislin has logged road time as a tour organist for Yes and Meatloaf.
From: New Jersey
Style: Folk-rock
Description: Slide guitar, banjo, twin acoustics strumming and picking; long, smoldering acoustic meditations, woodsy vocals.
Revealing Factoid: Debut American Altitude was one of the best albums of 2003. (That's not really a factoid, but I'll stand by it.)
From: Philly
Style: Synth-pop, techno
Description: Megan Wendell's confessional, beautifully-sung pop songs are driven in unexpected directions by husband Mason's elastic bass and synth playing.
Revealing Factoid: The duo double as indie rock publicists Canary Promo.
At 111 First Street on Sunday, October 3
From: New Brunswick, New Jersey
Style: Post-punk, indie rock
Description: Full-sounding, feedback-bathed, chiming, hypnotic and frequently gorgeous pieces of musical psychocandy.
Revealing Factoid: SFFAK head honcho Ralph Nicastro is a former member of Aviso'Hara, a linchpin of the late-nineties New Brunswick rock scene.
From: Philadelphia
Style: Raw, wry urban folk
Description: A closely-guarded secret by many who know and love her music, Mason writes frighteningly intelligent and intense explorations, confessional pieces, detached observations, and cool assessments of hot emotional states.
Revealing Factoid: Mason has self-released four albums on her own Spiderwoman imprint.
From: Japan, via NYC
Style: Japanese Action Comic punk
Description: Frequently dressed in outlandish costumes and prone toward stage kinetics, Peelander-Z has earned its reputation as one of New York's most outrageous examples of the creative energy of Japanocore.
Revealing Factoid: Peelander-Z has performed on The Cherry Blossom Clinic, the long-running and eclectic WFMU radio show.
From: Jersey City
Style: Pastoral, experimental folk
Description: The adventurous spirit of the Incredible String Band lives on in Pothole Skinny's thought-provoking hybrid of acoustic folk and electronic music.
Revealing Factoid: Pothole Skinny will be performing as an ensemble and will be joined at this performance by Pat Gubler, Tim Foljian, Mark Townsend, and others.
From: Jersey City
Style: Indiepop, electronic music, lo-tech disco
Description: A brilliant amalgam of junkyard transatlantic techno, spacious American rock, and spoken-word, the stunning instrumentalists of AWM create an immersive sonic backdrop for Jason Cieradkowski's tales of love and mystery in a decaying, disturbing Europe.
Revealing Factoid: Bassist John Fesken and guitarist Joe Centeno played in Jersey's popular and acclaimed Plug Spark Sanjay.
From: Jersey City
Style: Modern jazz
Description: On saxophone, horn, or electric piano, Beninghove is a skilled and expressive jazz stylist; respectful of convention but never hesitant to transgress it in the name of musical excitement.
Revealing Factoid: Beninghove also plays piano in the adventurous JC pop band The Ankles.