But first, rewind to June 2002. Secluded Alley Works hosts an artist open house/ musical performance. Patrons stroll between pottery and paintings before congregating around Swastika Girls. The band members finish a loose set of experimental pop and then give everyone in the audience a hug, one person at a time.
May 2003. After projecting films about toy characters onto a back wall, D.C.'s Black Eyes lay down a beat-heavy post-hardcore structure, percussion overtaking the room like a smoke bomb, producing chain reactions of dizzy movement. The audience blends into the stage and around a couple sculptures (including a bed made of grass).
August 2003, Sunday afternoon. Amidst colored smoke, fireworks, and extension cords, Friends Forever finish their performance in the parking lot behind Aftermath Gallery. The Denver act lobs DIY theatrics at indie kids and scrapes clean the crowd's resistance to heavy bass with amp-slaughtering, keyboard-tweaked tools.
These shows were all hosted by Loss Leader; if not directly--the nonprofit officially formed in May 2003--then by one of its umbrella groups, such as Slender Means Society, which put on a number of theme-based shows in 2002, or Meme, which curates experimental acts at CoCA. Loss Leader is six members strong, and two of its representatives, Sam Mickens (also of the bands the Dead Science and Degenerate Art Ensemble) and Scott Goodwin (also a Vera Project volunteer), recently sat down to talk about the work they've been doing together. (The collective also includes Hilary Bramwell-Mohr, Brian McFadin, Shilo Byrd, and former Stranger staffer Zac Pennington.)
"I wanted to do shows that were a mixture of weirder pop bands or weirder rock bands and completely experimental stuff," Mickens says. "A lot of it started out with... just feeling like in the last few years that a lot of really great indie rock, or punk, or whatever that's happening is really informed by extreme experimental music. It's getting more and more exciting."
The archive of Loss Leader's beautifully designed posters shows a wealth of both experimental music and experiments in genre-mixing, what Goodwin calls "interrupting the expected." Classical cellist Serena Tideman matched with jangly post-punks Display. Avant indie rockers Mecca Normal paired with laptop-king Bobby Karate. Modern dance meshed with free-jazz-leaning pop and noisy post-metal shattering glass with noise scientists. "We're not a rock club so we can handpick what we want to work with," says Goodwin. "And then ideally have some sort of overarching mark of quality. There's going to be something unexpected about it."
Loss Leader shows have included local and national names with a strong buzz behind them; Anna Oxygen's audio-visual electronic pop and Devendra Banhart's whimsical folk were both performed early on under the Loss Leader banner in galleries such as CoCA, Aftermath, and the now-defunct Luscious Studios, as well as in music venues like the Vera Project, with the venues handpicked to fit the bands. "It's cool bringing music people to galleries," Goodwin says, "because they're exposed to art they might not have seen otherwise."
Although there's some overlap with the house-show scene, Loss Leader makes its shows very accessible to the public, something Goodwin stresses is important to the group. "On the one hand, we're trying to be pretentious in some ways and promote events as really... very spectacular and larger than life, but really we're not trying to be pretentious and stupid," he says. "We don't want to be obscure or exclusive. The addresses of all our shows are on all our posters, and we have a website [lossleader.org]. I definitely don't want anyone to view us as a club because I think it's the opposite, really."
There are two Loss Leader shows this week, January 16th and 19th at Aftermath Gallery. See www.lossleader.org for details.
