Afroman on Thursday, Eightrack Mind on Friday, and Joan of Arc on Saturday.  DOPE anyway you slice it.

Afroman at Zebra
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Thursday, May 5th

Hip Hop – Afroman with Skye Bigg Nation - www.afromanmusic.com

Advance tickets $10 at Cactus Records, $13 @ the door

Afroman may be the first artist to achieve a worldwide hit with the assistance of the Internet.  Citing his influences as Too Short, Big Daddy Kane, and 2 Live Crew, he began his rap career in the eight grade when he started making homemade tapes of his own songs and passing them out to his classmates.

In November 1999 Afroman released his first album, Sell Your Dope, and played parties, sidewalks, and contests.  Not finding L.A. to his liking, he moved to Hattiesburg, MS, where he teamed up with drummer Jody Stallone and keyboardist/bassist Daryl Havard.  In the spring of 2000 he concocted his second LP, Because I Got High, with producer Tim Ramenofsky.  He distributed it at shows and with the help of T-Bone Records in Hattiesburg.  The more people he performed for, the more word of mouth spread, with not just a little help from the Internet’s controversial music-file swapping service, Napster.  Then Howard Stern’s radio show boosted Afroman’s popularity by playing the song on his show and the rest is history.

In 2004 he returned in a big way with the double-disc Afroholic…the Even Better Times, which he wrote, produced, recorded and marketed on his own via the internet ( HYPERLINK "http://www.afromanmusic.com" www.afromanmusic.com), and toured with a live band.  The holiday album Jobe Bells followed in 2004 and then came Drunk’n’High in 2006.

Eightrack Mind at the Zebra
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Friday, May 6th

Hip Hop – Eighttrack Mind with Decks & Drums, DJ Bones, Volt Strum, Jeni Fleming, Milton Menasco, Tiny, Mic B, Gentleman Script and more

Tix $8 @ the door

Eightrack Mind is an eight piece live Alternative Hip Hop band from Bozeman Montana. They have been performing, touring and dropping CDs since 2002, spreading their brand of Acid Jazz infused Hip Hop throughout the USA. Recently singed to Goon Trax in Japan they are now going International with their new CD Monster.

Eightrack Mind has its roots in the legendary “GCQ”, an instrumental project playing funk, jazz and blues regularly around the Bozeman area. It was common to hear their long time friend b’ nuggs, freestylin’ over improvised jams at their shows and this sparked an idea amongst some of the members to create a hip-hop project. With the players now arranged the group started practicing for a gig already booked but with no name for the band they just referred to themselves as the hip-hop side project. Most of which stuck and became The Side Project.

For that first gig they did not have what became eightrack mind. Mr. T wasn’t blowin’ that horn and DJ Bones wasn’t twistin’ those LP’s. In fact, DJ Beatnut was on the ones and twos. Anyhow, shortly after the first gig Beatnut moved off to N.Y. and The Side Project had to search for a new turntablist. After looking all over they came across the best of the best, DJ Bones from the Vinyl Surgeons, who readily accepted the mission.

Now, as a seven piece, The Side Project kept the local fire burning by heating up clubs from one end of town to the other. Soon enough a devout following began to sprout and the house was getting packed every night they played. But hold on, something was still missing and that would be Tyroneus Fonk, another former GCQ member who had been sitting in and playing trumpet with the S.P. It was easy to hear that he added that vital bit of something smooth that the Project needed, so he became the last permanent fixture in the music mixture.

With everyone in place they decided it was high time to quit drawing up plans on a comet and actually make it happen. So grab the ball on the rebound, they’re on a mission with all possible and no time for rough friction. A strong desire to play music successfully and bring it to four corners of the world has them busy doing their thing between dusk and dawn and pulling doorbells by day in an attempt to network the tunes. Once they got out of state however they realized they had to change their name. So The Side Project became eightrack mind.

After a few years of touring b’ nuggs decided that that life wasn’t for him. He left to pursue fishing and graphic design. With a hole left in the MC department, Murphy decided to put down the guitar and pic up the mic. He became the newest voice of Eightrack Mind and they brought in the extremely talented friend of Evan Williams, Chris Cundy on keys. Then when Tyson left a year later etm called on the talents of Cundy’s old band mate Ben Johns to fill the horn role. With this influx of musical talent the sound of the band evolved to a new level.

To date, in addition to headlining their own shows at venues including the Sundace Film Festival, etm has opened for many musical giants including the Wailers, Eek-a-mouse, Tone-Loc, Young MC, Digital Underground, the Wu-Tang Clan, Hieroglyphics, Abstract Rude, The Crown City Rockers, The Gift of Gab, Michael Franti, Soulive and many others. Eightrack Mind recently signed a deal with Goon Trax for Japanese distrobution. The Japanese release Monster was released in early May and can be found at Tower Records Japan. It is a compilation of tracks from the first two etm CDs.

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Saturday, May 7th

11 11 Presents Joan of Arc with special guests

Advance tickets $10 at Cactus Records or at  http://www.1111presents.com

Joan of Arc began as a band named Red Blue Yellow. They broke up after their first show, threw away all of their old material, and started afresh- with new songs and a new name. Three months later, Joan of Arc had their first show at Autonomous Zone in Chicago.

After two promising 7" singles, the band recorded their debut album A Portable Model Of... on the Jade Tree label. A Portable Model Of... introduced JOA's signature sound: a fondness for stark acoustic songs combined with subtle electronics. The debut album also included some harder material and collaborations with former Cap'n Jazz guitarist and The Promise Ring singer Davey von Bohlen and Euphone's Ryan Rhapsys, who would later drum for Owls following the departure of Mike Kinsella.

In 1998, Joan of Arc released How Memory Works. The album included what would become a hallmark of Joan Of Arc's subsequent output: interludes of synthetic noises cut with vocal samples and off-beat instrumentation. As always, Kinsella's lyrics were cryptic and oblique, though the song 'This Life Cumulative' made reference to the media alienation of singer/songwriter Fiona Apple. Following the departure of Mike Kinsella, Erik Bocek, and the addition of Todd Mattei, Joan Of Arc found themselves thrust unwillingly into the spotlight by the sudden success of a Jade Tree retrospective by Kinsella's former band Cap'n Jazz. Despite being heralded as a pioneer of a diverse genre known as 'emo' (a term rejected by Kinsella), Joan of Arc's next album was a reaction to this unwelcome classification. The songs on the album were slower and contained more spacious arrangements thanks to a newly found fondness for studio trickery. The album's artwork depicted recreated scenes from Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Weekend. The release of Live in Chicago also marked the increasing media perception of Joan Of Arc as a 'difficult' band, an impression that would dog Kinsella in particular throughout the band's existence. Negative critical reaction to Joan of Arc would become especially apparent after the release of The Gap in 2000. Completely eschewing past convention, JOA created one long ebbing piece of music, with only occasionally recognizable songs. This increasingly progressive studio-heavy approach- mostly of clattering, incidental percussion and background noise- found some favor among band loyalists, but baffled the music press. As a result, growing tensions within the group, indifference from their label, and a poorly-received follow-up EP led to Joan Of Arc's breakup. Tim Kinsella then formed a group called Owls, a reincarnation of the original Cap'n Jazz lineup. After recording the album with Steve Albini in 2001, the departure of Mike Kinsella and Victor Villareal led to the Owls' breakup. Left without a band once again, Tim Kinsella started working on songs for a solo album. After completing the album with help from Sam Zurich and Mike Kinsella, Tim

Kinsella decided that since all three had played in Joan Of Arc, it should bear the name Joan of Arc. The album, much different from the conceptual madness of The Gap, instead consisted of guitar-driven tracks with journal-like observation from Tim Kinsella. Heralded as a return to form, So Much Staying Alive And Lovelessness became the band's last on Jade Tree. Later that year, Joan Of Arc released In Rape Fantasy And Terror Sex We Trust on Perishable Records, featured collaborations with Califone's Tim Rutili and Ben Massarella, and was produced by Califone. Although the songs had been recorded during the same sessions as ...Lovelessness, they were darker and more collage-based. According to the website Allmusic, on In Rape Fantasy And Terror Sex We Trust "Joan of Arc...once more surpassed themselves as artists".[1]

To tour the albums in 2003, Tim Kinsella organised a new lineup including Bobby Burg, Nate Kinsella (Tim's cousin) and Sam Zurich, who would also double as his side-project Make Believe. After a live album recorded in Germany and a split EP with Bundini Brown (of Tortoise and Gastr Del Sol), the band assembled a huge team of collaborators for 2004's Joan of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain on Polyvinyl Records. This effort was largely well-regarded and a significant step forward for a new incarnation of Joan of Arc. For the album Presents Guitar Duets (Polyvinyl Records), Tim Kinsella rounded up ten former members of Joan Of Arc and others like Tim Rutili. Each was paired off with a partner by pulling names from a hat. Each pair then had to record a guitar duet together, and the styles vary from standard acoustic plucking to droning, looped soundscapes. The track-names are identified only by the faces of the pair who play on the track.

In 2006, Joan Of Arc released a compilation of rarities entitled The Intelligent Design Of... and also a new studio album entitled Eventually, All At Once, a largely acoustic affair. The Many Times I've Mistaken EP was released in 2007 followed by Boo! Human in 2008 and Flowers in 2009.

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