Turn off the damn TV
San Francisco’s Antióquia encourages everyone to unplug from mass media and dance
By Bliss 02/11/2010
For a band as freewheeling and dance-oriented as San Francisco’s Antióquia — they’ve dubbed their sound “Progress Rock meets Afro-Colombian rhythm” — they’re surprisingly enamored of silence. The theme of unplugging from electronic pop culture and embracing your own creativity resonates throughout their new album, “My Piano Ate the Front Page of the San Francisco Chronicle.”
“A lot of things we’re talking about [concern] city life, the craziness of the world, how mass media has totally saturated our lives now and it’s costing a lot of creativity and humanity and compassion for one another,” explains frontwoman Mana Maddy. “We’re encouraging people to use their creativity and turn off their damn TVs.”
On a visit to New York, she says they were constantly inundated with commercial media messages.
“It seemed like every conversation we were involved in had something to do with media. What about stuff that comes from within? What about our own unique ideas? We can be inspired and triggered by the things that come from outside of us, but what about letting silence in? And nature?”
A weeklong bike tour to Santa Cruz reconfirmed their commitment to environmental consciousness and living at their own pace.
“When amps are a big part of your sound, [bike touring] presents a whole lot of challenges,” Maddy acknowledges. “But … it basically proved to us that we’d love to do that a few months of the year. I can’t remember who said anything worth doing is worth doing slowly, but bike touring is really in line with that. If we slow down we can actually take things in more deeply, and live a more meaningful life.”
For their current Western tour, they’d hoped to convert their tour van to run on vegetable oil, but funds are constrained following the expense of recording “My Piano Ate …” Maddy, hubby/bassist Paul Martin, drummer Craig Miller and guitarist Adley Penner hope to accomplish that conversion before their April tour. Meanwhile, they’re focused on promoting the new CD (available at shows, and for by-donation download from their Web site April 3) and their polyrhythmic, psychedelic, genre-mixing sound. Maddy cites Primus, Mars Volta and Animal Collective as key influences, although the guitar solos on songs like “Police Brutality” hark back to vintage Grateful Dead. The Colombian rhythms undergirding tracks like “Boogeyman” should lure dancers across genre lines.
“I feel blessed to be in a band where we explore so many different rhythms,” Maddy says. “There are a lot of bands doing weird, quirky stuff, for sure, but it’s still not enough; people are craving something outside of the box everywhere we go.”
Antióquia, the Evangenitals and Cousin Junebug play Old Towne Pub, 66 N. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena, 9 p.m. Saturday. Info: (626) 577-6583. antioquia-band.net.
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